"curious about bolt holes, like exhaust etc.  Helicoiled?"

All tapped holes (except valve cover bolt holes and sparkplugs) will have thread inserts (not helicoils).

"Do you have timeline of when you think these will be released for sale"

Assuming we don't find issues with the "first articles", shipping could begin as early as late November.  We may start taking orders once we have approved the first articles and released production at the foundry.  You can expect regular updates.

For quite a while now we have been working on both medium riser and tunnelport modern casting designs. I don’t post on here very often at all and haven’t posted or published any updates on this project in a long time, but progress has continued despite several setbacks and distractions. Recently we have had some wins and I’d like to share them with everyone.

Our medium riser port design has been complete for over a year. The prototype MR head started as an Edelbrock Pro-Port casting. During porting material was actually added in the port to make it flow correctly, which meant this definitely couldn't be made as a pro-port CNC head, it would have to be a new casting. My brother, Dave Bamber, is responsible for all the flow work on this port design. Here is an idea of how the MR head flows and what it looks like:


The goal of this project has always been to develop ports for both MR and TP heads and cast each of them from the same pattern. So, once the MR was developed, we shifted attention to tunnelport design.

The TP development started by optimizing a factory cast iron head so we could digitize and apply it to the computer model. Hours and hours were spent on the flow bench. Some real nice flow numbers were achieved on the intake ports. The port was digitized and copied on all other cylinders. We had fully intended on dyno testing with this intake port design but as you’ll see in the pictures, when CNC’d, one of the eight intake ports found a water jacket (core shift in the head).
 


After that letdown, the port shape was brought into the computer model and it was tweaked to reduce some of the unnecessary stock port volume and to potentially gain flow. Rather than move straight into casting it was decided to 3D print the ports and combustion chamber for proof of concept and further flow development. In one of the photos below, there is a gold intake port mock-up which allowed us to flow test with the pushrod tube interfering in the port. Again, my brother Dave worked with this port shape on the flow bench and added and subtracted material where necessary. As you can see from the below flow data, it worked.
 



On each of the MR and TP heads we had common development constraints, which in some cases held us back from gaining performance, but we thought were important to the design:
•   Stock Medium Riser and Tunnel Port intake manifolds (direct bolt up with no port matching required)
•   Stock exhaust port locations (slightly raised yet consistent with typical aftermarket FE performance heads and compatible with over-the-counter headers/flanges).
•   Overall factory appearance when the engine is fully assembled.
•   OEM style rocker assemblies
•   Stock valve covers
•   MR head to work with bore sizes as small as 4.08” (.030” over 390)
•   TP head to work with bore sizes as small as 4.16” (.030” over 428)

Here are screenshots of some of the computer modeling that has been done on the heads.



Patterns and molds are finally progressing and we can now see light at the end of the tunnel. When these are available, they will be cast/machined by me (Bamber Engineering) and sold through Brunson Performance. We will post more technical info/graphs/test data on their website soon.

Any more details on the medium rise heads, factory original, updated?

They are cast aluminum heads based upon the medium risers.  Stock medium riser manifolds fit, but port matching will be recommended on the intake manifold.  Stock rocker arm type set-up will fit – a small cup offset will be needed on intake rockers.  Stock valve covers fit as well.

The combustion chamber and both ports have been greatly improved.  We want to include the smaller bore engine market with these – as I mentioned above, the heads are optimized for a 4.130” (and larger) bore, but the valves fit with comfortable clearance on a 4.080” bore (.030” over 390) engine.

Dave isn't a participant on any forums, so I'll update.

We have developed tunnel port intake modification prototypes for the pushrod areas.  With a viable prototype in hand, we scheduled a dyno session to run baseline tests with a stock tunnel port head/intake combination and the tunnel port intake with our prototype modifications.  Unfortunately, the tunnel port test engine had serious unrelated issues.  We are now in the process of getting a good engine to use for intake modification testing.

In parallel, we have been using a medium riser head for combustion chamber and exhaust port development which we will apply to the tunnel port heads.  We are happy with our progress.  Our medium riser head is being developed and flowed on a 4.130” bore. The flow numbers (intake and exhaust) are significantly better than a TFS tested on a 4.350” bore and all other medium riser heads that we have seen advertised data on or have on the shelf to compare.   We are in the process of building a 462 CID (428 stroker) engine to test the medium riser heads, but among other things, we are waiting for a single plane, 4V TFS intake for testing.  If anyone knows of a TFS single plane 4V intake manifold we could buy or borrow for this testing, please let me know. 

If the dyno results for the medium riser heads meet our expectations, we will make them available.

Once we have tested and are satisfied with intake manifold modifications, the exhaust port and the combustion chamber development, we will continue tunnel port head design by developing a compatible intake port.  Casting development will start after the exhaust port design is finalized.

I have read through this a couple of times and I hope I didn't miss this. Will you be offering intake manifolds for your heads? I know with some searching tunnel port intakes can be found but having one or two choices ( my vote is for the single plane dual four C7OE-9424-A) would make this an easier for guys to make the purchase, in my opinion. I would also wonder if Jays intake adapter would open up some choices for other "tops" too??

We will develop and offer manifolds after the heads release.  The first version will likely be a single plane 2x4. 

I know Ford made at least 4 different manifolds for the tunnel port - 2x4 single plane, 2x4 dual plane, single plane 1x4 with 4150 flange, and single plane 1x4 for a dominator.

Forgot to mention - The M-57 HV pump uses 2.92 HP at 7,500 rpm.  The parasitic torque is fairly linear, rising only slightly as rpm goes up.  It's a little over 2 ft-lb at the crank.

Note that this parasitic loss includes the crossed gears that drive the pump.  They're pretty inefficient, but that is how it's done in our FE's.

Nice work!  When you reference RPM, are you referring to pump RPM or crankshaft RPM?

Have you considered raising the port and extending the face of the head like Kasse did with the SR71?
Those seem exceptional for a CJ style head.

We will consider this tactic; we've used it before, too.  The feasibility of using this tactic on the FE, however, is affected by the fact the upper valve cover rail is part of the intake manifold.  Since we want to allow the use of stock valve covers, moving the upper valve cover rail up, requires raising the lower rail, too.  The exhaust rockers may not be very happy about that idea.  These re-designs are almost always an exercise in optimizing the compromises, so we will have to work through all of these choices.

Would it be possible to machine the pushrod tube as part of the port as opposed to placing a tube in after?  There would be a lot of benefits doing it that way.

Compatibility with existing intake manifolds is one of our design criteria - but that doesn't mean an unmodified tunnel port manifold will provide optimum performance.  It only means it will fit and function.  I believe your question applies to the intake manifolds we will produce.  If so, the best manufacturing technique will heavily depend on the characteristics of the optimized intake manifold runner design.

I'm not saying anything, to throw water on anybody's ideas. I just wanted to comment, on stuff from the late 60's thru mid 70's........

No worries here – your experience is a great example of why we chose the tunnel port head to improve.  We believe the Tunnel Port has tremendous untapped potential, and our goal is to fully tap that potential.

My question to jbamber is, what valve head sizes will be run in the canted vs a inline head.

We won’t know the valve sizes until we are finished developing the flow.   Given the tremendous space constraint of the stock valve cover, the valve angle and cant will be very limited.  I doubt the sizes will be significantly different than are commonly used for the “in-line” FE heads.  Dave is REALLY good with exhaust flow, so you will probably notice a bit bigger exhaust/intake valve size difference than is typical.

It would have been a lot easier for us to repurpose the 385 Boss Hemi design to fit the FE – which would have significantly larger valves, and more performance potential.  However, we felt the FE community would rather have the maximum performance possible while using stock valve covers and manifolds – as close to a “factory” look as possible.

Weather or not you go ahead with it....please post more pics of your development units, that thing is just plain cool!

Thank you for the kind words!  Not all of our prototype heads turn out as cool as the BBF Boss head did.  Until recently, we 3d printed them.  Dave prefers to work with aluminum, and the time I had to spend altering the model so it was conducive for 3d printing provided no further benefit.  By doing them from aluminum, my programming time is leveraged when we machine the production heads.