I used to live down the streets in Torrance CA back in the mid 80s right down the street from Stupid Shops. I mean super shops
Well right across the street from super shops was a hot rod shop called The Service Center. It was run by an old crotchety hot rodder who pretty much always had an attitude all the time. He was like the soup Nazi except for hot rod parts When I was looking through the shelves one day I saw a pair of these ported polished TA heads that I just needed to have. the price tag on them was $400. I made the mistake of asking him how much he wanted for him and he replied “what’s the tag say?” I said “says 400 will you take (something less)?” He goes into full attitude mode and says “those aren’t ordinary 340 heads. Those are special and worth every bit of $400. get the hell out of my shop and don’t come back. I know what the hell I have and I know what they’re worth. Take your business somewhereelse. Good luck finding a set of heads like that“

I totally felt like [censored]. he was actually kicking me out of his shop. He meant it. Before I left I turned and apologized as best I could andfeig ed ignorance and pleaded with him to sell me those heads and he finally said OK.

Soon afterwards I was thumbing through that book titled “how to build a small block Mopar“ and I saw that section about Bob Mullen where it talked about how he was a major designer of the 340 TA heads and how he was the guru as far as port and polish on those for maximum performance. The article also said something about how we had a shop down in Carson California I believe. Either that or somebody told me that he had a shop down in Carson. I can’t remember. But found he had a shop so I made an appointment to bring the heads down there to have some Machine work done on them. I showed him the heads and said I wanted him to touch up the porting and polishing and flow test them and do a valve job. He gave me a quote on the machine work. then he said as for touching up the porting and polishing he would not do that and he also said.hesnot gonna flow testing either. When I asked him why he said because I’ve already done that. These were heads he had ported and polished and he said they flow as good as you can get so i don’t have to waste any money on touch ups or flow tests.

I was tickled pink. He did the machine work and I put them on my 340 and have been a happy camper ever since. Fact is they’re still on my car today. I did have to port match the intake to the heads and cut down the intake so it would bolt up tothe heads. The intake would otherwise sit too high bc the heads had been milled down to get the 63cc combustion chambers. If I can find some pictures of the porting i will post them but it was pretty radical. The intake ports were cut so large that it actually broke through to the threaded valve cover screw holes that go between the two intake ports that are next to each other. I had to install studs and Loctite them in to prevent any leaks. I know none of the pictures shown in the post above have that feature so if I can find those pictures I’ll post them up. Here’s what they look like last time I adjusted my valves