Even if they aren't smart enough know good from bad aren't they smart enough to hire someone to help them? If they are too dumb to hire someone to help them then how do they stay in business at all? Just one of the mysteries of life...........
In this case, the same could be said about Edelbrock.
If they would just cast the ports and chambers of the BB victor in the right shape/size to begin with they'd have an off the shelf unported std port head that would flow 340/240 ootb.
Yet the two "revisions" to that head have actually resulted in poorer flow ootb, and require even more rework to get decent numbers out of them.
Probably not a concern for the shops with cnc porting machines, but for the guy looking to not spend $1000+ on porting, they've taken the Victor head out of the picture for most buyers.
It's really just dumb.
I don't know what went wrong at Edelbrock with the Victor heads. Edelbrock obviously has the resources to design great heads. My guess is that they gave the Victor head to a junior engineer who got lost in the design and for some reason the senior engineers didn't help him out. That is just my guess but it is based on 30 years of experience in corporate America R&D. I worked at places like Xerox where we invented some of the greatest stuff ever as well as complete duds. It was always due to the people on the team. Some people invent cool stuff, some people invent turds. Management is supposed to promote one and fire the other but sometimes they make mistake too.......
Anyway, that is my guess on the Victor heads. The chinese heads I chalk up to laziness. The chinese will copy a good head if you tell them to so someone over here was just too lazy to find a good head to send them.
As for Chapman, I'm not sure what went wrong there. Maybe the founder just got tired and retired? They had killer stuff but then the company shut down. Maybe something else was wrong with the company that I don't know about. That head design could've been sold to someone else but evidently it didn't happen.
Oh well, Trick Flow saw the opening in the market and stepped into it and that works for me. Their heads make enough power to break a stock block so what more do you need? If you have an aftermarket block then go ahead and step up to the B1 or Indy stuff. Seems like there are more than enough choices to go around.
