Hi PD,
I don't know if Instant Messaging works or not if both parties are not on-line? I check in when I can, but tend to be away for a couple of days at a time.
The story of my engine is a long and painful one. When I bought my car, the engine was 100% stock, and had the DeTomaso "sport" option, which included basically a different intake and Holley carb. It was in fact an Australian Cleveland.
While driving home from buying it, I broke a valve spring. Long story, but finding Cleveland valve springs in the middle of no-where in France (which is where I was) was long. Two months later and I had my car back.
A month after getting the car back, I broke another valve spring. Getting tired of replacing valve springs one at a time in far-away shops, I decided to replace ALL the valve springs. And as long as I was replacing the valve springs, I may as well replace the heads that hold them, right? And as long as I'm changing that, I'd better install a new cam, a new intake, new carb, electronic ignition, blah blah blah. You know how that goes...
I got the car back 8 months later and it ran fantastically. For about a month. It started bending pushrods on a regular basis, and as the pushrods bent they came out of the socket on the roller rocker and beat that up pretty badly. A very long story (that appeared in POCA - I can send you a copy of the article if you'd like) but I went with Mike Drew to the 24 hours of Le Mans, then from there to the DeTomaso factory, and from there to the International DeTomaso Meeting in northern Italy. I basically spent every morning adjusting valve lash to compensate for my bending pushrods and keep my engine running for another day.
The engine basically lived until the end of the meeting and not much more, as I didn't make it home. So it went back to the shop.
The root cause of the problem was poor head preparation. I bought the Aussie quench heads from an outfit in California that basically did a very poor job. The oiling problems that resulted from pushrods coming loose broke whatever components hadn't been replaced in rebuild #1, so rebuild #2 was basically just as complete.
Touching anything even resembling wood, the engine has worked flawlessly since then. I still have a fairly large collection of bent pushrods, but think that those are a thing of the past.
Later cars had Australian Clevelands, but other than having walls a little thicker I don't know of any real advantage. The stock 351C felt a lot like the stock US-Cleveland I had in my old '72. It wasn't particularly rev-happy, and would really run out of gas around 5500 rpm. I think that DeTomaso's estimte of 350hp for their sport option was probably optimistic.
I don't know exactly when they switched from Clevelands to Windsors, but sometime around 1987-1988 or so. And having spoken personally to some Windsor-powered owners, the sport option they paid extra for on their engines was, well, kind of bogus, as they got bone-stock Windsor truck engines.
I forgot the original question.... ;-)
