Let's do it!!! Mopar Motor Monday!
This is the LA 408 in my '62 Valiant V-200, which I've never really gotten to run right since we could no longer get 93 octane gas in California. It's supposedly got 10.5:1 compression with open-chamber heads and a Comp Cams 246-degree cam at .050. It detonates quite a bit on the 91 octane, so recently I've only been driving it around town easily a little bit, with the vacuum advance disconnected, and have been driving my other Mopars instead. Hopefully the TRW forged pistons haven't been damaged by the detonation. I did a cold compression test recently and all cylinders were around 155 lbs., so I'm thinking it is probably OK. I'm not even sure what the combustion chamber volume is, and I suspect that I have about zero quench with these heads. I need to do a custom advance curve, pull the heads and CC them, see where the pistons are with relation to the deck at TDC, and maybe buy some closed-chamber heads, depending on what I find. But I have two other restorations in progress and I need to rebuild my tractor's engine before I can get to it.
This is the LA 408 in my '62 Valiant V-200, which I've never really gotten to run right since we could no longer get 93 octane gas in California. It's supposedly got 10.5:1 compression with open-chamber heads and a Comp Cams 246-degree cam at .050. It detonates quite a bit on the 91 octane, so recently I've only been driving it around town easily a little bit, with the vacuum advance disconnected, and have been driving my other Mopars instead. Hopefully the TRW forged pistons haven't been damaged by the detonation. I did a cold compression test recently and all cylinders were around 155 lbs., so I'm thinking it is probably OK. I'm not even sure what the combustion chamber volume is, and I suspect that I have about zero quench with these heads. I need to do a custom advance curve, pull the heads and CC them, see where the pistons are with relation to the deck at TDC, and maybe buy some closed-chamber heads, depending on what I find. But I have two other restorations in progress and I need to rebuild my tractor's engine before I can get to it.
