peanut ports

a lot of people think that peanut ports heads are great boat anchors. I know lots of people who used these heads on smaller rat such as a 396-402 and sometimes a 427. They used a smaller duration roller cam and the power and especially the torque was very impressive! I hear that using 2.19 1.88 really help this casting out and little bowl port and a competition valve job make it flow very well, not too mention the smaller port makes a lot of velocity! i honesty think a nice set of peanut port( 236 casting) that had little work such as opening the intake port entrance to a large oval port gasket size and let it funnel in to the smaller port and some bowl work and a good valve job, these heads could out proform a set large oval ports on smaller engine such as 396 or 402. what do you guys think?

I think it all comes down to what you want to do with the motor. If you're looking for a low-rpm 9.0:1 small cube street motor using a streetable cam, I don't think you could beat the small heads. You could build a real stump-puller with them in my opinion.

Agree with techinspector1...I would do the same thing with them, but in my opinion, it's a waste of money and time to do the bigger valves and port work. Use them as they are, fine. The port work and flow increase will only show your efforts when you see maybe 6k rpm, and you wont see that with these heads. And as far as out performing the large oval ports, no way...They would be quick out of the hole, but would run out of gas really quickly, where the others will keep pulling. Thats why they used them on trucks! Lots of power, but low rpms. They're just not a performance head, no matter what you do to them. But for a tow truck or stump puller, great!!

If your going to use these heads stick with a dual-plane manifold , if you use a single plane you might run out of air at the top end.

while on this subject what would be a good cam for a engine like this with 9-1 compression?

this cam will work good for mild power roller cam gm roller cam .483lift.224@.050. 115 lc and $40.00 at www.competitionproducts.com or some thing on a 110lc but not to much more lift 530 or so well that is what i would do for a low to mid rpm engine