Next up: cylinder heads...
I finally was able to speak to 3 companies about their offerings. I found a brand new set of LS3 castings with springs and valves that I was all set to purchase and have worked over. This is when I 'outsmarted' myself though...
In typical engineer fashion, I created a spreadsheet to track my planned expenses for this little project. I was comparing the costs of buying the LS3 heads and working on them vs. buying an aftermarket casting. My math was telling me that I was only looking at a $500 difference. At that cost, it seems to make sense to just go for the aftermarket castings.
I ultimately decided to go with Chris Frank and Frankenstein Racing Heads. Chris has a long history in various forms of racing, one being NASCAR, and he branched out on his own a few years ago. He spent a lot of time discussing my engine, and specifically my two options (at the time) being either the 402 rebuild or the 427 upgrade. We left the conversation with me deciding whether to go with the LS3 or the Trick Flow GenX castings.
Based on my math above, I decided it was mostly a no-brainer and selected the TFS castings. Chris described 2 different port and intake valve options which I will select from, based on my displacement choice and desired engine usage/cam selection. He has also offered to tailor the port/valve combination as I need, somewhere between his two standard port selections. Since he starts with a 'head porter' casting, he doesn't have the limitations of the factory LS3 ports already being fairly large.
The other thing we discussed was my intake manifold. I'm going to have Chris port match and open up the runners a bit to match the ports on the TFS heads. He has 2 levels of porting he can do: this, which is a port match plus runner cleanup, or a full-on plenum modification to customize to my exact application. The latter is definitely overkill for me, so the port match / cleanup will be perfect.
One more nice thing about FRH is that they are located outside of Dallas. So when everything is ready, I can drive up there and pick it all up in person. I'm looking forward to checking out his operation and talking to him in person about some of the other things he does. For example, meet the Chimera billet LSx head:
Now, back to that engineer / spreadsheet comment I made earlier. I realized as I was tweaking the numbers near the end of the week that I screwed up and my math wasn't apples to apples. I almost wish I hadn't caught this, because it means the 'upgrade' to the TFS castings was a bit more of a step than I originally thought. Oops. :\ Oh well, I'm happy with the decision, just a little miffed at myself for missing that detail.