Good suggestions on heads from everyone. Both Dart and World products make an excellent flowing iron street head and they are assembled and ready to run at a fair price. Also don't forget the GM Vortec heads. They are the best as cast flowing iron head GM ever made but they do require a Vortec bolt pattern intake.

I just finished a port and polish job on a pair of '72 smogger heads for my 355 engine project. Why? Because I had never done this before and it was a lot of fun. They had also been cleaned and magged before I started working on them. I left the intakes unpolished but port matched them. The chambers and exhaust ports look like mirrors. There are several good online sites that will guide you through the process.

Anyway, after all this work I still had to take them to the shop for a 3 angle valve job, all new valves (stock type), exhaust guides, better than stock springs and seals and .020 off the surface to arrive at 9.3 cr with a .020 compressed head gasket and flat top Silv-O-Lites .044 in the hole.

Bottom line is that all this work is costing me US$400. on a pair of heads I already owned. Don't pay $300. Canadian for a pair of bare heads that are going to need everything (assuming they mag ok) and then put another US$300. in them. Buy new for less and be done with it. Let some restorer that needs the numbers on those 461s mess with them.

Tom