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Interesting toppic... a while back a guy came into napa that runs a machine shop out of his home garage. He showed me some of his work, which was very impressive, and I brought up an aluminum head idea. He said could do it in two pieces for around 300 bucks plus metal cost. How would a two piece head work? Are the water passages eliminated?

Also,anybody know if there is a Petronix kit for 6v neg. ground? Maybe one for a VW or something would work...

Two individual 4-cylinder heads on a straight eight wasn't uncommon, Hudson with their Greater Eight being one of the several advocates of that arrangement. But I'm quite certain the layout of the water passages and stud arrangement precludes that on Packard engines.

I've seen this done before on a turbo charged 327 motor that was put in a Tub. There is a video on YouTube of it racing around.

The head is made of two slabs of aluminum (a top and a bottom). The water jacket is then machined out of both pieces and of course the plug and bolt holes and combustions chamber, etc are done as expected. Then a gasket is used, and the two halves are bolted together an complete assemble, which is then in turn bolted to the motor.

The trick is do to the machining correctly there is good sealing around the plug areas.

Only way do do it really without having to cast the head because of the internal water jacket.

There was a company out of austrailia that produced a two piece head for the hudson hornet 6. The bottom piece was water jackets and combustion chambers and the top was just a cover. it looks very similar to the clifford head the 2 pieces were located with dowels and sealed with avation cement. The web site 21stcenturyhudson.com (think thats what it is) has info on the hudson head and the owner had one for sale a few months ago. It was made from 2 castings that were machined but near as i can tell it would work just as well with aluminum billet. I roughly priced out the aluminum in my part of the world and it will be close to $600 for two pieces of thick enough aluminum to square up and dig into but the idea is sound.