I chose other
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Poll: Does your car have an OEM motor/head
- Thread starter Markos
- Start date
Original block and head is the first option. The first option encompasses any period head. You can’t actually tell if your head is original, only if it is period correct. There is no chassis number or even a month on the head.
You should vote for original motor head within two years. Even if it cracked in 87 it has held up for another 30 years.
Data!!!
Don't you want a category for orig engine and head the same year? Date coded a few months before production?
Hi @Stevehose,
That level of detail certainly wouldn't hurt. The basis for this survey was to see if period motors have period heads. The underlying driver is to see if the period heads were replaced 70% of the time, as I guesstimated without any real data volume to back it up. If I looked at cars that I have owned and inspected, the number would be closer to 100%. The data shows me that we are consistently hovering at just under 40%. We have hundreds of folks visiting this site, they just aren't voting!
So going back to the "X year delta" choice of working, and why I didn't include a precise description to capture truly original motors. My thought was that if your head is within two years of your production year, you are still using an early head regardless if it is tied to the original build or not. Since the root question is whether the early heads survived, I thought "numbers matching" (I know I know) originality was irrelevant. It's either an early head or not. I could have been more precise with my "X years" figure. A production/model year 1975 vehicle + 3 years gets you are into the start of the revised cylinder head, introduced on the M90 in 1978. It is pretty unlikely that the votes in the "original motor, head 3+ years out" category will be a 1971 motor with a 1974 head, etc. That is an assumption of mine based on bias, which is bad for a survey. However, I wanted to use the survey to capture other stuff that people might find interesting, like how many folks are running S38's and B35's. The poll option only let's you include a handful of options.
Come on folks. The survey isn't perfect but chime in!!!