Heads (061’s) for 1967

Q: Heads (061’s) for 1967

Anyone know what kind of compression bone stock 1967 061 400 heads will give me?? iam getting conflicting information about them, some say they are open chamberd and other are saying there not.

A: The 1967 061’s are indeed an open chamber head, they are the original put out as sort of a prototype, and they are unlike any before or since. The chamber is very open, but the chamber measures out to about 72 cc’s… It also has 2.11 int and 1.77 ex valves…. The down side is that it has press in studs which aren’t as reliable, but you can convert them cheap, relatively. These are probably the cleanest chambered head… I asked George Hanks about this set of heads, who has personally worked with these… he said

” the #061, used on grocery getter 400s in 1967. I’m convinced that this head was the prototype for the later production open chamber heads, but the Pontiac engineers learned something on this head that they incorporated into all of the round port performance heads of the RA-II, IV, HO, and SD-455 heads. While the 061 still has the A.I.R. bosses in the exhaust ports, the chamber is the most open of any of the production heads. There is almost no ridge across the chamber, as two separate cuts were used during the machining process, and the spark plug hole is located in the highest possible portion of the chamber. In addition, the rear or squish wall of the chamber is laid back to a 60 degree angle, producing a true polyspherical chamber, with an absolute minimum of squish area. These heads have been ignored for years, primarily because they did not fit into any of the NHRA performance engines, and they had pressed in rocker studs. The A.I.R. bosses clog up the exhaust ports, and within the old non-porting rules of NHRA, nobody cared, but with some porting and screw-in studs, this head will knock your socks off. It doesn’t flow any better than any other D-port head, but the conversion of fuel to cylinder pressure is just as good as the RA-IV heads.”

If you get a copy of Pontiac Musclecar Performance 1955-1979 by McCarthy, it will tell you about these heads, good reference for part numbers, heads blocks, etc… 061’s are also mentioned in the H.O. specialties book, “Pontiac High performance Engine design and Blueprint assembly”… That head should give you compression in the realm of 9.8-10.1 with stock pistons… I’d love to have a set of them…. I’ve been looking for those for about a year now..

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