Looking at buying a stroker kit and cylinder heads for a 460 off ebay. The stroker kit im looking at is made by probe industries and is being sold by "the mustang depot", anyone ever heard of these companys and have any experiance with them? The stroker kit is considerably less than other kits, but like I said never heard of the company, concerned with quality. Also A company called gr8hotrods is selling High performance aluminum heads, made by "procomp pro" part# 3051-a, any experiance with these? they look like good quality but one Issue I see Is the d-port exhuast ports, what headers would I have to buy to fit in a 1983 F-250 4x4? if i were to purchase these?

 

i would stay away from either one.

have not heard a lot of good about Mustang Depot on other sites. i think there is a lot better places to buy quality product from.

as for the Procomp heads, they are basically a copy of the factory heads but in aluminum. so they have a lot of the short comings of the factory heads (restictive exhaust, bad port layout, etc) and the fit and finish of the heads is really, really dependant on who you buy them from. some companies upgrade the components that the heads come with to at least better quality stuff (valves, sprins, retainers, etc) compared to waht they come with from the foundary. even then the final machine work is really dependant on who is doing the work. there are some people selling Pro-comp that do a lot of work to them to get them up in quality, but then they are not that much cheaper than a real good set of aftermarket heads by then.

if it was me, i would stay away from both these sites and look at different vendors with a better reputation and workmanship. i would look at either the Edlebrock heads or the TFS street heads or even the Kaase P-51 heads ( alos a good souce for stroker kits) if i was you. more money but the final product is worth it.

Monsterbaby has some good contacts for stroker kit vendors that will treat you correct and get you a good quality product. BF Evans racing, RM Company, Kaase to name a few but there is more.

remember the old saying, you get what you pay for is very true about ebay vendors.

rgds
Mike

 

eBay Motors: BUDGET 460 BBF FORD Stroker Kit 557 MUSTANG TMD (item 350100710913 end time Apr-19-09 09:38:03 PDT) =

eBay Motors: FORD 429 460 ALUMINUM CYLINDER HEADS ASSEMBLED #3051-A (item 220371228897 end time Apr-01-09 09:04:52 PDT)=


heres links to the items just in case you care to look. Thanks very much for the reply, I pretty much figured the prices were to good to be true.

 

Procomp heads are basically only giving you bragging rights that you know how to waste money on your engine and have alum heads. even with a lot of money spent porting them they still will not be competitive with things like the TFS streets which is the ones I would suggest for what appears to be your application unless your building a race only (then all bets are off and bring out the cubic dollars)
As far as stroker kits without even linking to them I see the 557 cid and once again unless your building a race engine looking for every bit of HP you can squeeze out of it, I would suggest not going with the 4.5" stroke or boring clear to .080 over unless needed to clean up the block. a 4.3" stroke with 6.8" rods at .030 over bore (4.390" bore) is a real nice setup at 521 cid and will make real respectable numbers while having an advantage on longevity over the max cid units. JMHO

 

Thanks for the replies, sorry about the links, as far as the stroker kits the one im looking at is a 521 kit, the one I posted a link to is listed as a 557. The heads are out of the question at this point, been made clear that there no good. Would you happen to know about the quality of the stroker kits? Im under the impression that scat produces the kits and sells them under the probe nameplate, not completly sure about that though.

 

No they are not scat crank and rods. They use the hawks which are just like a lot of others in that they are chinese cast AND machined. The scat units are cast in a scat plant instead of just a generic plant like a lot of the rest then usually brought over here and finish machined.
That kit also uses the KB hyper pistons instead of forged, guess that is ok just don't push them too hard ever. Don't know much about those rods although I suspect they are the eagle SIR rods that didn't pass QC.
I have never had personal dealings with mustang depot but mike brought up I have never heard anything good about them either. Customer service stinks and the quality of parts is marginal at best has always been what I have heard.
a couple I can give you is Carl (he is on this site on occasion)
CarsByCarl.com

Or you can call Brian
http://www.adperformance.com/

Or if you want the best I can get you the numbers of someone to buy a good crank from, then you can call Lem evens and get rods etc and Call Eric at Diamond and get your pistons and piece the kit together if you want to got that route (just PM me and I can get you the numbers for those guys) But for put together kits the above vendors are who I would recommend.

 

Thanks very much for the info, I kinda assumed that quality would be an issue when I seen the prices. I priced out a stroker kit in summit and It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1800. I looked at carls site and Im pretty sure Ill purchase my stroker kit from him, his street bruiser kit would work good for me I think. As far as cylinder heads Ill probably end up going with trick flow or possibly edlebrock, unless you have a better option for those as well?

 

Your head choices are both good. I really like the tfs heads personally with the only issue I have is they only come in 74cc chambers where as the edelbrocks you can get in 95cc so you can keep the compression ratio down for pump gas easier.