Reply to "Mangusta Hi po Engine"

Here is a set of '67 289 HP heads for sale on ebay right now.

There are differences with them in that they have an additional lump of material cast into them in the exhaust ports for the air pump tubes.

The '67s HP heads do have the pockets for the spring seats and screw in rocker arm studs.

Valve sizes are the same as for the 68 302 as are the port pockets and the 53 cc combustion chamber.

On an engine built to use an automatic transmission like these heads, the air ports were not drilled.

On the heads intended for the manual transmission they were.

There is no better air flow between the heads, one vs. the other.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ford-M...em43c8c80941&vxp=mtr

You would have to go to the GT40 heads to get that and even so by todays standards even the GT40 race head doesn't flow very well.

The flow numbers that I have seen show really about 250 cfm on the intakes on the C6FE GT40 heads and about 220 cfm on the 289-302 4v head ported.

Stock they show something like 180 cfm.

My block says C80E on it. I'd have to have it alongside to see the difference on a C5 block but as far as I know just the caps on the HP block are thicker and other than the caps, it's the same block as regular production 2v and 4v engines.

The HP blocks themselves are not thicker in the webs. The GT40 block is thicker though.

The last variation of that block is what went into the '69 Boss 302 production engines and was marked C8FE which is the same casting as the Trans-Am race cars.

My "expert" tells me that the Boss production blocks are not exactly the same though.

Most think of those as 4 bolt blocks but there is a genesis of development on them and some are two bolt mains.

As with any Ford product especially special applications like these, you can never say something doesn't exist because it probably does somewhere.

It doesn't seem like they threw anything away. Someone somewhere would have gotten it.

When you bought the engines has everything to do with what you got. With the Mangusta the timing is everything.

I remember a story that was told from the '80s ( I think) about Jay Brunk and Caroll Shelby partnering on making '66 GT350 convertible "continuation cars".

The story was that because of his friends still at Ford Shelby was able to get brand new 289 HP engines for the cars out of Fords "private" stock warehouse. How many were still left in that "pile" no one would say, but there were still some left assembled.

How true this is and not just sensationalized journalism I don't know? But the story was told.

Performance wise it isn't worth going out of your way to find a real 289 HP engine.

Change the cam and the valve springs in the 302 and you have the same thing performance wise with the added benefit of a few extra cubic inches.

What would be neat in a Mangusta would be a 302 that had been gone through porting the heads, cam and either a 331 or a 347 stroker kit in it.

There are more than a few 331 Boss track cars running around and a whole bunch of 347 street cars.

The 331 is better if you are going over 7,000 rpm like a race car would but the 347 is what you could run on the street and really is a super sleeper since there is no way to tell what it is by just looking at it.

Any way you look at all of this though is that it is really a fun subject to discuss.