A friend of mine gave me a bear 1.6 cylinder head for my pinto
He said that i should do a stage 1 gas flow mod and change the valves to a standard 2 litre this should up the CR nicely?
I was looking at upping the CR on my pinto anyway but is he speaking crap or has he got a good point, as I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like that??

Fitting a 1.6 head (not E-Max though) to a 2.0 will raise the CR. Not sure about valve sizes.

If you're building a Pinto the I'd recomend a copy of Des Hammill's "How to power tune the Ford SOHC" book as a good start point.

It would need alot of work to be as good as a std 2L inj head..

Get a 2L inj head skimmed and use a thinner gasket.. I doubt it'll be worth while working on the 1.6L head..

Ive just had 1.5mm taken off my 2L head, that has given 10.2:1 cr .

the 1600 heads do have smaller combustion chambers, so it will up your CR

I think the 1.6 GT heads (rare) have 1.6 sized chambers but with 2.0 ports and valves

the 2.0 injection heads have better port shapes and so need less work

I guess the real question is - how high do you want your CR to be ?
there might be an easier way to get there that using a 1.6 head.....


I second the Des Hammill book, loads of info in there (there are normally a few s/h ones going cheap on ebay etc...)

[Edited on 11/9/08 by mcerd1]

As said in previous post, yes you can fit the 1.6 (non Emax) head and the prefered one is the 1.6Gt head as this has the 2.0l Valves and porting and if out of an original 1.6gt, it will even have the 2.0 camshaft.
Fitted like this it would take the 2.0 up to about an 11:1 CR.
You would then need the carb(s) and manifold to suit this extra breathing ability.

This used to be the original boy racer trick in the Mk3 cortina days.

what about having the block decked ?

well i do have a 2.0 injection head with r1 carbs at the moment but i would like to put the CR up to 10:1 or 11:1 n/a as i am looking for more torque and efficiency
i also have a felpro head gasket but i did not put it on when the gasket blow as i did not know if the valves would hit at all

we have 2.1stage 3 pinto bike carbs and specialist manifold using 1600 big valve head and there aint many naturally aspirated cars that beat us on drag strip so i guess they ok

I recall this was mentioned in Des Hammills book. Worth a read.