Cylinder head choices

[Kody24]

I'm doing a low buck top end on my 350. Its going in my 81 3/4 ton 4 wheel drive. My goal is good torque and throttle response from idle to around 4500 and reasonable mileage. I'm throwing an rv style cam on a stock bottom end with new valve springs, an edelbrock performer intake and edelbrock carb. I'm going to be polishing my chambers and exhaust ports and cleaning up the intake ports and back facing the stock valves. So here's the question. I have several sets of generic truck heads and a set of 305 HO heads with the small chambers. Since this engine will likely never see 5,000 rpm, will I be better off with the slight compression gain from the small chamber heads or will the small valves still choke it down even at low rpm? This engine is getting bolted to a th400 with a stock converter and I'm running 3.73 gears with 33's, so cruising rpm will be low.

 

[Rusty Nail]

Cool story bro.

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[yevgenievich]

I have ran 305 HO heads on a 350 a while back in a 85 GMC. Had a mild summit brand cam kit. It ran out of air by 5k rpm, but otherwise ran pretty well. If heads need work, might be better money spent finding better heads to start with. But just throwing it together for a decent runner they seem to work

 

[fast 99]

There are some OK aluminum heads in the 1k area. Here cost to reman OEM heads are 400 plus parts.

I did a re-ring on a 350 at parts cost last year for a friend. Guy only had 1K to do it. Both heads were cracked.

Found out non Vortec 350 heads are getting hard to locate. None of the machine shops had any core heads. Went to a pick and pull yard, found a pair on 2 different vehicles. Between the 4 heads had enough good parts to make a set. Cost was still 500.