Affordable Iron

HOW TO PICK BUDGET-FRIENDLY CYLINDER HEADS FOR YOUR 360 LA AND MAGNUM MOPAR BUILD.

- Jeff Smith

Many Mopar fans believe that life still revolves around the original Mopar small-block. Sure, the Gen III Hemi makes great power, but so do the early LA and Magnum engines and parts for those are generally more affordable.

It’s also a well-known fact that the castiron heads, after proper selection, can be tweaked to make very respectable power on these platforms. So let’s go do a little small-block archeology.

Dave Hughes has been building and tuning Mopars for more years than he probably cares to admit. Hughes Engines is all about Mopar power covering all the bases, but he really pays attention to the small-block stuff. Much of this material emanates out of his experience. We’ll start with the early, or LA, engines. Yes, there’s the polyspheric smallblock, but we’ll leave those to the vintage crowd. The LA era was expansive, spanning 1964 to 1992 and offered what are Mopar’s finest small-blocks.

Current OE parentage no longer services or sells much of this stuff and digging up early castings borders on Indiana Jones– type adventures. Among the older LA pieces, the 308 castings are good. But if you find a set, they’re likely either cracked or will require significant machine work to resurrect them. There are better ways.

The next in lineage is the Magnum era heads. These spanned from 1992 to 2004 and were used on 5.2L and 5.9L engines. There’s a whole movement that retro-fits Magnum heads to the earlier LA engines with favorite casting numbers like the 466, 671, and 714 heads. But these suffer from thin deck surfaces and can be crack-prone. Like their earlier cousins, a used set will likely need plenty of machine work. But if you find a set in good shape, they’re worth the effort.