Reply to "What would you motor guys do?"

Those are the dished pistons and the open chamber heads. It's an 8:1 engine.

I would suggest that if you are going to do something that you go with a rebuilt set of the 71 4v closed chamber heads, ported and with one piece stainless valves.



Actually the iron heads don't need a lot of work. The valve pockets need the cast in restrictor rings removed. That detail clearly shows in the Ford Boss 302 Off Highway booklet cross section of the heads.

You can get those "reasonably" because seems like everyone wants aluminum these days?



The heads and pistons you have are consistent with a 73 CJ Cleveland. This also means you have the 73 CJ camshaft.

I would change that cam. It is 4 degrees retarded on the timing marks.

Use a hydraulic lifter cam if you want but go to something with at least 236 degrees at .050 and you really want something around .585 lift or better.

This will be a pretty healthy 10:1 engine and you definitely will feel the crispness in it vs what you now have.



Pull off those head gaskets and look for sepage marks around the water ports where you were seeing leaks.

Actually one of you pictures shows evidence of something happening around the lower rear water ports. This is where you were seeing leakage.

The heads themselves show surface pitting on the flat surfaces. Those heads should be milled to clean that up. I would think at least .010" but that depends on how deep the worst pits are.

It is possible that a couple of those pits are holed through from the inside as a result of a bad casting and casting flash getting dislodged?



Chances are it is just the head gaskets themselves.

Many actually will "rot" out around the water passages neat the corner head bolts, oh and use new head bolts and make sure you use the Fel-pro gaskets and torque them down in sequence as the shop manual indicates.



It is entirely possible and most likely, when that engine was apart to go .020 over, the heads weren't torqued down properly.

The Clevelands need to be really tight on the head bolts.



I personally wouldn't use the Aussie 2v heads unless they were fully ported but then if you were going to spend that money, there are better heads to use.

That much porting isn't cheap to do.

Those are just good if you want to spend the least amount on a rebuild and get additional street grunt.


Even ported, those will fall on their face under head to head comparisons with a closed chamber 4v and the right camshaft.