Engine and Transmission Tech

Anyone have fairly recent use of heads, aluminum roller rockers/etc ? I bought a horde of new parts, but am being told on another forum to trash them. Build is 540", 6,500 max rpm, 91 octane, street/strip. Thanks, roverman.

I am pretty sure that Procomp sources everything from China. I know that some of their stuff is garbage, but some I've seen seems OK. E.G.: Distributors = trash, Carb hats = good.

Just my 2 cents....

M.

Art, I've heard the heads quality control is poor but I would double check everything and port anyway. For a while there were problems with the rockers being returned and oiling issues. I think recently the quality has improved. Hard to buy anything not made offshore anymore. I really like their 4 barrel throttle body.

I've used a lot of Procomp parts through the years the rockers I would stay away from the cylinder heads are is good is any head on the market outside of dart or trick flow Canfield's AFR's and Procomp's are all the same casting when they started out I've used five or six of the Procomp electronic ignition modules a.k.a. imitation MSD six box I think they run as good as an MSD if not better the intake manifold on my car is from professional products which is a Procomp company we live in a world nowadays where you just cannot avoid buying parts from China Mexico and other places all the big companies even with American names are still buying in building a large percentage of their stuff overseas you cannot avoid it Procomp sells many engine parts and electronics that are just as good as their American made competitors at a fraction of the cost my brand-new MSD distributor that is in my car has the exact same part number stamped on the magnetic pickup as the Procomp distributor that I pulled out of the car when I was a kid we all bought Japanese stuff was junk boy we all know better now don't we

> Anyone have fairly recent use of heads, aluminum roller rockers/etc ? I bought a horde of new parts, but am being told on another forum to trash them.

I dyno tested a set of Pro Comp 351C Ford cylinder heads. They are a copy of the excellent CHI 351C heads from Australia. On a 400+ HP street 351C, they were down 50 HP to the CHI heads and made 30 HP less than the stock iron closed chamber Ford 351C heads. On the flow bench, at low lifts, the exhaust actually out-flowed the intake. Comparison with the CHI heads showed the Pro Comp intake valve seat was much lower and the only way to correct it would be to install a larger intake valve. While that might look better on the flow bench, they would likely be shrouded on the 4.0" diameter block bores. Very poorly executed. I would at a minimum, hardness test them to see if they were properly heat treated. FWIW, I've seen some other low cost Chinese heads (SBF Flo Tek GT40 copies) that appeared to be much better executed. I'd absolutely throw their rocker arms or any other parts that could wreck the engine away. A friend tested some Chinese copies of the Crane SBF hydraulic roller lifters on a valve spring tester. To the naked eye, I could not tell the difference between the Cranes and the Chinese copies. Even the stainless parts on the Cranes were also stainless on the Chinese link bar lifters but the axles locked up at 500 to 550 lbs of pressure. We typically run 300+ lbs open spring pressure and when you factor in the rocker ratio, we'd operate right in the range where the lifters would fail.

Dan Jones

Gentlemen, please use punctuation.


I check fine print carefully, and I go way out of my way to avoid buying car parts or anything else from mainland China.

Here's the way I see it.
Chinese parts, and in particular Chinese auto parts are almost exclusively unregistered copies of someone else's product.
While claiming to be legal. Chinese industry is virtually unregulated. Outright ripoffs of another product are the norm.
As an example lets compare a tail light for a XXXX car. The chinese reproduction will be a near exact copy. Except that it is the thickness of the plastic lens larger! They literally cast a copy of the original but don't compensate for the thickness of the new plastic.
Ever noticed that many of the parts are just ever so slightly bigger.
This part is then sold at a discounted price because the originator was cut out of the loop completely.
Almost without exception, parts are beautifully machined and finished. But the material that they are made out of is junk. Plastic parts shrink, warp and fade prematurely. Metal parts are the wrong material or heat treat. Many times cast parts are porous and covered up with bondo.
Of course there are some things that are perfectly acceptable, but we end up with the issue of a properly registered product again.
It's completely unfair for a producer to go to all the expense , trouble and time to come up with a product only to have it illegally copied
and more often than not put out of business.
Sometimes these products end up being dangerous. Remember the melamine in baby food, or how about the arsenic filled drywall that destroyed so many buildings in Ontario. Not to mention brake rotors that shatter upon a hard application.
We buy these products because they are cheap. But really they are very costly. Chinese workers are being killed in unsafe work environments.
And if you think about it you are busy putting everyone you know out of work!
The current situation is not sustainable.
As long as we are willing to accept ever declining quality in exchange for a cheaper price.
We will continue to be an ever increasing consumer and decreasing producer society.
This will only have one logical outcome.
And it ain't pretty.
Fred

Car Craft did a comparison of six SBF heads that included the Speedway/Flo-Tek heads. They spoke somewhat favorably of them. [www.carcraft.com]

I don't disagree with what you guys are saying about the evils of buying Chinese products, but its hard for me to believe my buying practices make any difference when so many American companies have moved production to China or other asian/latin countries. There's a derelict factory in a town less than 20 miles from where I sit, it's where Petersen manufacturing invented and produced the Vise Grip until they were bought out by Irwin Tools, which promptly moved production to China. The consumer just buys, corporations decide to put my neighbors out of work.

You just kinda made my point Ryan.
As long as we are comfortable prostituting ourselves for a price, we are assured to come out on the losing end of the deal.
The corporations can't do anything without consumers.
So who, really, has the bigger stick?
Anyway, back to the question at hand.
Art, the procomp stuff is middle of the road in my experience. And as Dan said don't use anything that would trash your engine if it should fail. The heads that I have experienced were quite soft and threads pulled easily. So thread inserts are a must. The material looked thick enough and the softness might aid sealing??
For a street engine probably just fine. For a race engine...do you want to win or not?
Cheers
Fred