I get a PM from TonyD in September of 2012 about the Goerz-Paeco DOHC L6 Head coming up for air.

Which led to a brief discussion about what would be involved in producing a head. And that was the end of it… Or so you thought.

Tony and I started trading emails about the feasibility  of producing it and what kind of heads we could use as a donor for the valve train. Tony suggested bringing Jeff P on board because of his work with cooling the L6 head. Tony and I kicked around RB and KA motors for a while and then Tony suggested checking out theHonda K20. Bingo. Removable cam towers, factory roller rockers and a plethora of aftermarket parts. I called one oh my clients that is big in the import drag market and  procured an old K20 head. I did some quick measurements and decided that it was probably workable. And so the journey began.

The idea is to use the cam towers and valve train from a K20.

I grabbed a quick scan with my white light scanner of the exterior. It’s dirty because I’m only using it as a reference scan to design against.

I imported the scan into my solids program and then proceed to replace the mesh with solids.

Jeff provided me with a great CAD drawing of his head gasket to work from. I decided to take a module approach to model the head. I made a single cylinder complete and the copied and offset it for the other cylinders.

I then pulled the solids together to create a single model

I was pretty much at a standstill until I could figure out the timing chain setup.

Although I have a build thread on HybridZ I thought it would be a good idea to create a blog for this project.

First a little about me. I’ve been involved with 240Z’s in one way or another for over 30 years. It pained me to type that:) I’m an independent pattern maker for the foundry industry. I have a fairly high tech pattern shop. Two CNC routers, Two CNC mills, 3D white light scanner and all of the traditional saws sanders etcetera that you would normally find in a pattern shop. I also do short run vacuum forming and CNC machine prototype and production work on castings.

Back in 2007 I decided I wanted something unique for my 240. Being a patten maker it had to be a casting. Doing research led me to HybridZ. Here are 3 links to the build. It’s an interesting read if you want to know what goes into a traditional sand cast intake manifold. I received an enormous amount of help and encouragement from the HybridZ community along they way.

Design stage        Pattern making       Casting and machining

The intake manifold project was great but what I really wanted to do was a twin cam head. At the time it was just too much of an undertaking to do with traditional pattern making tech. Even with CNC machines. It rattled around in my head for a while and as they say timing is everything. I was starting to use a fairly new technology that produces foundry sand molds via 3D printing. The results were amazing. Not only were they patternless the normal constraints of split boxes and draft no longer applied. The more I worked with it the more I WANTED to work with it.

And then I get an email from the infamous TonyD