panther

Alright, I'm going to order the new heads for my new 355 and would like a little imput. A little background, the car will remain a ported tpi setup. I want the engine bay to remain stock appearing for now so it stays. Anyway, I've narrowed my choices down to three, AFR 180, AFR 195 and Trickflow 23 degree heads. They are all three aluminum and all three flow pretty good but I'm looking for a little feedback from those with these heads.

I'll be running a ZZ4 cam with 1.6RR and full length Hedman headers if that matters in anyones choice.

bubba353z

I don't own any of them yet, but I like the AFR 195's. Are you going to keep the TPI long term, or do you plan to upgrade? The reason I ask is that the 195's are probably going to be more than the TPI will need.

I have a Stealth Ram that is going on soon, which should work great with the 195's. If I were staying with the TPI, I'd consider the 180's - should be a torque monster.

You'll probably get praise / horror stories from owners of both brands, but IMHO the AFR's are the better choice - if you can afford them.

Dyosis

What he said.

Edit - I voted for the 195's before I saw you wanted to keep your TPI setup. The TPI setup is my restriction now and I am getting a Stealthram down the road. Torque is fun, but only being able to rev to 4500rpm is

You can makeup for lost torque with a stall converter and gears. If you truely want to make horsepower, your going to have to rev over 4500 rpm.

dj haf

save yourself the money and get yourself a set of dart iron eagle 180's. you dont need 190's or 195's with tpi. i run a hsr setup and im running a set of ported 180's. with the 180's you make crazy torque and good top end hp. you need to match your heads with your cam and intake. lets assume u end up going all out later down the line with lt runners, ported base and plenum... with that cam, you still wouldnt need to get 195 cc heads. do yourself a favor... the dart pro heads are pretty good price wise, and performance wise, they're excellent. do a search on them... you'll see what i mean. it would be a waste of money to spend it on afr's when you're not going to be using all that power. you might actually loose power where you want power to be and gain power where you wont be using it, if you go with the wrong heads. when i had my darts flowed before they were ported, they flowed 210 @ .450 and 170 @ .500-.550 (w/ pipe). these heads, even with the hsr, make first gear impossible to launch off of, lol. take my advice... get a set of 180cc heads if you plan on sticking with tpi. it just so happens that, for their price, the dart iron eagle pro's can't be beat. they flow very well for 600$ a set bare. get yourself some good flowing valves, some springs that can handle the lift your cam will throw at it, and you're good to go. these heads make the stock 350 l98 heads look like factory crap. oh and if i were you, i'd get sfc's and lca's if you plan on using that setup... you wont be able to catch traction with all that torque

anthony714

hoss theres too many variables that you need to know before someone can recommend a head...lay out everythign that sgoing into your motor and drive train and then lets decide.but either way any of thos eheads youchoose you wont loose

ZZ17IROC

Well it's all about what you want and how much money you want to spend. I think AFR are over rated for the money when you can do the porting yourself, but that's my opion. I settled for a set of TFS 23* heads. Alot of people don't know about the new casting, meaning the Kenny D series 23* head. It replaced the G1 series and know they're called G2 meaning generation 2 style. I went to summit to pick mine up and they had both the new and old casting on display. I noticed the big difference in both of the runners right away. The G2's had [B]NO[/B] casting shift and had little to no casting flash, in which the G1's where notoriouse for and that's why some people where not happy when they first came out for SBC 23*. And most importantly TFS unshrouded the valves for you. Let me just say I picked-up an average of 19 CFM from .400 to .600 lift over stock out of the box flowing and at max lift .600 I picked-up 25 CFM bringing the total to 283 CFM opposed to 258 CFM stock with some home porting that took me 7 days to do. I started out with part # TFS-30400007-CNC+ that had CNC-ed chambers, so porting was easy. It was not hard to smoothout the ruff spots because the new casting was smooth from the start, but I was very careful not to remove alot of material killing flow velocity. The local shop I where I had them flowed said I did a nice job on them and that was the first time he saw the new casting. He liked them too. Thats cool because he sells AFR.

anthony714

well im got the kenny d castings myself,havent received them yet,should be tommorrow,but my head guy recommend the or the top prolines..he also agreed the afrs not worth the cash cause the tfs or tops are just as good or better..

Meatman

AFR 195s are going on my 355, but I am also going HSR and pretty good size cam. If you are planning on sticking with stock tuned port the 195s are probably gonna be a bit to much. Your gonna choke the heads with the intake.

Damon

If you can swing the cost, AFR 180s. I have the 190s and they are not over-rated in my opinion. The best out of the box head I have ever seen. If you can get good quality porting done on your heads for free, then just about any aftermarket head is going to appear to be a waste of money.

Here's why I like AFR:

1. The heads flow what they say they do. Not that there aren't a few dissatisfied customers, but the vast majority of people find they flow what they claim. It's the ONLY head I have ever seen a magazine test show they flow MORE than what the manufacturer claims. And it's not just a high peak number, flow is FAT everywhere in the lift range- exactly what you want for a street motor.

2. Great customer service. They support what they sell. Always buy direct from AFR, not through someone else. Some companies buy bare castings from AFR and do their own port/valve work on them with questionable results. All the magic happens in AFR's proprietary CNC porting.

For your application I'd choose the 180s over the 195s becuase you need good torque and you're not going to be lifting the valves very high. The 195s don't start to outflow the 180s until past .500" lift. The 180s will also have better velocity with the smaller ports, further helping torque.

panther

Thanks for all the replies.

I plan to keep the stock tpi at least until I want more power. That said, the one thing I don't like about the Trickflows is they are 195cc which is why I included the AFR 195's in the poll for a comparison. The car the engine is going into was only driven about 900 miles last year and I don't expect that to change this year. I bought the car to work on and have "completed" when my 6 year old son turns 16 I know it sounds strange but my first car was an 84 Z28 so his first will be a third gen Camaro too It's one way to keep third gens alive in the hearts of the next generation of drivers. As the car is now, my wife has taken it to work and I have taken my son for car rides but that's what it's used for. That's why I believe the stock tpi will work for now.

As for a breakdown of what's happening when the engine goes in here it is:

355 roller block fresh from the machine shop
kb flat top pistons 10.1cr(64cc) or 9.7(68cc)
new pm rods
new stock steel crank
ZZ4 cam
Comp Cams roller tip steel rocker arms
new flexplate, dampener, timing set, timing cover, oil pan, oil pump
Hedman 1-5/8 long tube headers
Flowmaster American Thunder 3" Cat-Back
!cat
!A.I.R system
new torque converter, I assume 2400-2600 stall
new Spohn LCA and LCA relocation brackets
New Spohn panhard bar
either Spohn coilover kits or Tokico shocks/struts & Eibach Pro Kit
new suspension bushings
Spohn sfc

I might have missed something but I'm sure most everything is there. I am ordering heads, cam and shocks/springs (or coilovers) in the next week. That is if I figure out what heads I want.....

ZZ17IROC

Whatever your wallet can handle is what it ***** down to. Different strokes for different, both products are good.

NastyTA

I like the AFR's, just b/c that's what I've got more experience with. I've done some work with the TFS heads, nice piece, but nothing spectacular. The heads that I'm putting on the motor I'm building now are AFR 195's. I have no dyno or track numbers yet b/c the motor is still on the stand, but the heads flowed 302 @ .550 with 1 5/8 pipe on a superflo. Stock chambers but with a 2.055 intake valve and 1.60 ex. valve. A bit of bowl work but nothing crazy and i opened up the intakes just a hair and pormatched/radiused them. I was sceptical on the numbers, so I took them to another machine shop and they flowed 305 there, so they should run pretty good.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you match the cam to the heads, heads to the intake, and make sure all three work together. Too much cam for a particular head will run like crap. An intake that's too small for a big head will run like crap and so on. Remember that everything has to work together.

The Dart I package seems nice too. Comes with Dart I heads and dual plane manifold. Match it to a nice cam and you're set. I think Summit has it for $1300

BadSS

Why is the correlation between volume and flow rarely mentioned? Flow per cc can give you a better idea of whether one head has a more efficient port than the other. Even when comparing different manufactures heads dividing the flow at lift by the port volume can get you a lot closer as to which head has the better velocity than by just looking at the port volumes. Still there is the difference in valve sizes one has to consider. Meaning if two heads have the same volume, and flow, and one has a smaller valve,,, the smaller valve head is more efficient and in turn will have greater velocity.

See,,, the volume of the head is just that,,, the volume. I can tell you I’ve built a few engines with Iron Eagle heads ranging from 180 to 215cc and I’d pick the 215cc head in all but the mildest of combinations. The 215cc heads pull harder than the 180s under full throttle over and there is not that much throttle response difference between the two heads using the same cam. Another thing that people have a hard time grasping,, is you can go smaller on the duration of the cam (but keep lift high) with the bigger and better flowing 215 head and have as good or better throttle response and better top end power than opposed to running a larger duration cam with a lesser flowing 180cc head. Plus,, the larger heads have more room to grow. Out of the box, the 180 head has about a 400 horse potential in a very well built street engine,, regardless of the cam you throw at it. The 215s have the potential of putting you close to 500 horses with the right combination right out of the box.

Check this Comp Cam Article’s link.
http://www.comp.com/Community/Articl...?ID=-436566108
It is a dyno comparison between all the Iron Eagle heads from 180cc to 230 on the same engine. While I don't agree with everything the article says, over all it's well done and the dyno numbers pretty much back up my own experiences with different sized heads. Even though the 180s have a better cfm to volume ratio than the 215s (and smaller valve) until .500 cam lift,,, the 215s make near identical power numbers to the 180s until 5000 rpm and makes more peak power at a lower rpm.

So,, as far as the original poster goes,,, I hope the above info helps you make your own decision on what heads would work best for you. I myself think the 195 Canfields are as good as you can get for the money and keeping within the constraints of a 1205 gasket (which you have to do running the stock TPI or even the StealthRam unless you want to weld up the intake). With the least little bit of “clean-up” the Canfields can flow as good as the 195 AFR heads for hundreds less.

Hope that helps.