Patriot Heads
 

I know that there are several "offshore" cylinder head programs out there that are inexpensive alternatives, but what about the Patriot units that are available

The ones we saw had 2.30 intake valves and were a 320 style head.

How do they hold up?

you know i subscribe to several car mags and each always has a cylinder
head flow test, and they use all the big names, dart, brodix, edlebrock,
all big names. I have ask them to test all the cheap heads out there,
patriot, EQ, procomp, no name heads to see what they flow, we already
know that canfield and dart have proven well under big flow, lets
see the cheap heads, i would like to see them flow or fail and is it
worth the money or waste of money, i bought my canfields bare,
aluminum new for $1,300. a set. lets test the no names :shock:

bargain heads
 

Stay far, far away. You can get a "good" set, or you can end up with non-fixable junk. An untrained eye cannot visually tell the difference. Roll the dice - do you feel lucky? Grit your teeth, dig a little deeper into your pocket, and buy a set of quality, proven heads. The heartaches poor quality causes isn't worth the possible savings you MIGHT receive. Just my $.02.

Thanks

I was not sure as they seem to be in the Name Brand price range compared to some of the others that are close to half

Dart castings are one of the best you can get, and are not too unreasonable on price. The difference in price is well worth it.

We've tested numerous head/cam combinations and the AFR's seem to be the best buy, both sbc and bbc. They have thicker deck surfaces than both Dart and Brodix.

sbc heads
 

I have a 355 sbc 10:1 four bolt main. I had a set of 340292 64cc heads with a performer RPM non-air gap. We bought a set of 180 AFR street heads, 68 cc combustion chambers, and put on a Motown single plane. The difference was incredible. You could actually feel it in the seat of your pants. I would say anywhere from 50 to 100 hp easily. This is in a street 57 Belair hardtop, which is a very heavy car to start with. We did do some minor port matching on the intake to match the head ports. Other than that, it was a straight bolt-on. An added benefit was that the detonation we had with the iron heads went away. Anyway, I feel that the price of the AFR heads was money well spent. That's not to say that other heads are not as good or a better value, but I would not trade these for anything else. One person's opinion. Mike Pscenicka (mep)