[Greg Reimer 7376]

One of the reasons for the cost, besides its for the price that horsepower comes with, is that it is very labor intensive work. You almost can't charge for what its worth because of the expense of doing it. A set of heads is as much work as doing the rest of the bottom half of the engine. If a bottom end failure does in the short block, cam, pan and related items, that's pretty seriously bad enough. When one or both heads gets hurt, that adds to it or doubles the equation, in both dollar value of pieces, but in time spent above and beyond that. Also, like everything else that is cast iron, variations in castings from the foundry onward, will result in a part being just OK, a Better part or a Good part. One out of every 10 or 20 might be an Excellent casting, which means its better to start with. Before all the incredible head work and intake work came into being, racers used to flow bench test sometimes 20 heads, and kept track of the variables. Out of the 20, enough variations were obvious in that two heads were over and above the rest of them, those became the best performing pair of the bunch, justifying the further money that was going to be spent on them. The rest probably wound up in the ads somewhere. The newest technology applied to heads tends to result in more heads being acceptable,since the necessary work will tend to equalize them with the top of the line head a little more. Variations in castings can even be traced to foundry data and date codes and that sort of thing. Lots of builders know what further numbers on a given set of heads to look for, all 041's or 462's or 290's aren't always equal. Cylinder heads are a whole art form in engine building that takes this sport to an unforeseen level.