Building a hot 360

1973dusterkid, I hope I am not hijacking your thread, but I built a hot 360, too. I used zero-deck pistons, milled some heavily-ported "J" heads down to get a 10.5:1 CR, installed 2.02" intake valves and used a Comp Cams 20-243-4 camshaft, which has about 246 degrees of duration at .050 and about .480 lift, IIRC. I got a lot of detonation which I have never been able to get rid of which, needless to say, was rather disappointing. It ran fairly decently on 93 octane gas when it was available, but now all we can get around here is 91 octane, and the engine doesn't like the 91 too much.

I didn't know anything about quench when I built the engine (still don't!), but now I am pretty sure you shouldn't do this with open-chamber heads. The guys on here have been really nice in trying to help me, but in order for them to advise me further I am going to have to remove the heads, make some measurements and report back. It's on my "to-do" list, for sure. When I do start a new thread on my LA 360, I hope you will chime in.