The centered plugs were likely the Boss '9 with those neat pre-production valve covers as shown above.
On the Cammer, I've been looking for an old article and even a Ford side-by-side drawing of the early versus production exhaust port. The story I recall is different. Moving the plug to the topside didn't have much effect on power. As noted above the engineers were puzzled as to why the engine was down a bunch on hp in early iterations. I do remember the drawing showing the 1st gen port with a 'dog leg' bend. The final and now D-shaped port (at least, D-shaped when looking down the throat) clearly lost the dog-leg bend in it and became the production port.
I do think this is what Ed Pink was referring to with early blown nitro Cammers burning a hole right though the port!
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HRM] You started with Ford flatheads, then Chrysler Hemis, but you’re known for your development of the Ford 427 SOHC “Cammer” motors. How did that start?
EP] We had just started with the 426 Chrysler getting our feet wet. The Lou Baney Ford dragster was a Woody car that McEwen drove with a 392—it won the first HOT ROD Magazine Riverside meet. Lou came to me—we had a great history already—and he asks about running a Ford engine since he had a Ford agency. We went to Dearborn and I liked what I saw. I thought it would be good for drag racing to have something other than the Chrysler, and I thought the factory involvement would be good for me in later years, so we said let’s do it. Ford shipped engines, and from the time we started to the first time on the track was three months. I was able to take things I did with Chryslers and put them to use on the Fords like roller rockers and cams, but good, sanitary engine building was the real key. The first time out, it sounded good and ran good and had no problems. The bad thing was the cast-iron block was heavy, and the exhaust ports had a dogleg, but there was not enough material to get rid of it. We ran it that way for a while, but when we finally got the aluminum heads, that’s when it came to life. It lost 75 pounds and could run a lot harder. I preached to Ford we needed them—I raised so much hell Ford finally got us the aluminum heads. The first time we ran them, the exhaust port blew [apart] and I didn’t know how to fix it. I called Fran Hernandez at Mercury and he tells me to go to a coatings company called Absa Bond in Long Beach, California, to use one of its space-age coatings. That fixed it. It was a secret coating used on rockets that had just been released. I tried it on valves and combustion chambers and other things, too. When I put it on pistons, you had no way of knowing how much combustion temperature you were putting in it—you had to run it much richer and take lead out of it or you would melt the piston right down to the skirt. When you looked at the piston in the bore, you’d swear it was OK, but when you turned the block over, all of the aluminum was stuck to the cylinder walls. It did its job.
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