I haven't heard good things about dart heads, is anyone running them?

 

Nobody running these puppies?

 

I have been running them for two years. They have been good heads for me and there are two porters out there I know of that can make them sing. Mine are out of the box except I did disassemble them and do some work on the valve cover bosses to make sure my Crane guide plates would fit and my Crane valve spring tool. That stated, I will be selling them in the spring. I have something "special" cooking on the back burner this winter

 

Did you go with the 205cc or 225cc version? What mods do you have and what results did you see on the dyno/street/strip? Thanks!

 

They are the 205's. Picked up about 25 hp over the stock heads. Mileage also went up because the 62 cc chambers upped the compression as well. Note, these aren't AFR's by any stretch, but they are a heavy casting that has future potential if someone wanted to put them on and port later. Mine are also one of the very early castings.

 

I've compared the manufacturers flow specs of both the dart and the AFRs and the dart heads flow very similar to the afr heads. The afr heads do a bit better than the dart on the exhaust flow however. Really only 25hp? I would expect more than that as the dart heads absolutely blow the stock ls6 heads out of the water and I've read that just upgrading to ls6 heads would give you 25hp.

 

I also decreased my cam lift by removing Crane 1.8 rockers and replacing with Crane 1.7 rockersat the same time. That may be part of the reason. Also, compare at 0.200 and 0.300 lifts and see what happens to your comparisons. The valves don't spend much time at peak lift where max flow occurs. One other consideration, unless they are flowed on the same bench, the numbers aren't very comparible.

 

AFR 205cc 66cc combustion chamber
Valve Lift Intake Exhaust
.200 140 112
.300 200 170
.400 251 203
.500 281 221
.550 292 226

Dart Pro 1 205cc 62cc combustion chamber
Valve Lift Intake Exhaust
.200 156 109
.300 215 154
.400 258 187
.500 290 205
.550 298 210

ETP 215cc 11 degree casts 62cc combustion chamber
Valve Lift Intake Exhaust
.200 152 106
.300 219 152
.400 266 190
.500 301 204
.550 312 208


The Dart head seems to be closer to the ETP heads then the AFR heads with the numbers that the manufacturers present. In addition the darts come with 62cc combustion chambers that will bump the compression to 10.8-11.1 depending on the gasket used.

I'm not sure of the significance of the better exhaust numbers of the AFR heads but it seems to be commonly excepted that the ETP heads make big power and if I knew nothing else about the head I would think the dart heads would perform better than the AFR heads as they are, like I said, more similar to the ETP than they are to the AFR. Any thoughts?

And true, they were not flowed on the same bench, however, I would hope the manufacturer's numbers aren't too far off as I would think they would want to avoid tarnishing thier reputations.

 

Only thing I can add is the Darts out of the box don't seem to provide as much power as the AFR's. Most of the ETP head installations I have seen are on max effort cars (huge cam, etc.) so it is a bit more difficult to compare for that reason. A lot of guys run the AFR's with all sorts of cams so there is a lot of data out there on AFR's with everything from small cams (like mine or even stock cam) to some that are running some big cams. I personally don't like the huge cams and prefer to retain the street manners that the smaller cams provide.