I thought I knew all of the exotic Ford engines from back in the day...

[WConley]

Imagine my amazement when I saw this today!  Anybody care to hazard a guess?

Check out the crazy belt drive.  This is not a home built one-off.  The castings are made from production-intent tooling and it was intended for a production car.

[ericwevans]

Looks to be a SOHC Cleveland.  Wonder if deTomasso ever produced them in quantity.  For the Pantera?

[WConley]

Yup!  You've got it. 

The top end was designed and manufactured by DeTomaso to build a more potent Pantera 351C engine.  Ford apparently was unimpressed with the potential warranty nightmare of that belt drive, so they said No, Grazie...

The guy has several sets of castings, but I don't think they'll see the light of day anytime soon.  It would be a tall order to build a running engine from those unfinished parts...

[jayb]

Man, a triple belt drive!  No wonder Ford passed...

[WConley]

It looks like the triple belt drive solves the problem of cylinder head stagger while using the same length cam for each head.  They also had to do everything behind the water pump flange because the Pantera firewall is right there.

Apparently that trapezoidal belt tooth profile made quite a racket in testing...

[Katz427]

Wow! One on me for sure. There were several different cylinder heads for the cleveland some for emmissions studies. A couple of those resided at the Motorsports museum in Novi and may still be there. They were all pushrod actuated. I seem to remember seeing a 3 valve Cleveland at one time. There were a pair of experimental heads on ebay many years ago. Round intake ports and raised exhaust ports with the plug moved and a different chamber. Looks like the Italians were thinking but probably hard of hearing. It must have been Loud with that drive! Mr. Conley did you see the chamber and valve layout?

[WConley]

Unfortunately I didn't get to see the underside of a cylinder head 

From the spark plug position and where the cam tunnel is, I would bet it's a canted-valve setup with finger follower valvetrain.  The later 2.3L OHC engine has this type of layout.  Anything less would be no advantage over the stock Cleveland 4V head.  Here's what the 2.3L OHC looks like:

[Heo]

I'm thinking there must be a lot of friction losses in that drive system...
Funny thing with that 2.3 L. The European 4 cyl 1.6 and 2.0 looks almost the
same on the outside but have 3 cambearings, valves on a straight line,almost
nothing is the same. Except the oil filter. Why build two similar engines at the same time
same with the German,English and US V6  3 different engines about
the same size