Are the heart-shaped chambers the 'best', or does it depend on application and piston types? I'm planning to have small chambers (with aluminum heads) and a small-domed piston for detonation reasons (at least, speculating for a possible future project). Just curious on possibilities, thanks.

Just wondering if anyone had any input on this. Thanks, sorry for the bump.

They are probably the best going right now. IMO, the best setup is flat top pistons with chambers sized to give you the CR you want. A quench distance of .035-.045 will increase detonation resistance substantially. Domes are a last resort.

Pat, what do you think about using a dished piston, decked block and heart shaped chamber? I don't know what it would to HP wise, but it seems like it would make a nice burning chamber?

That should work pretty well. I'm not up on dish vs flat but domes are the worst.

Small chamber with a dish is more efficient and produces more power than a bigger chamber with a flat top. This is from an article in Hot Rod or Car Craft sometime in the last year. I'd been curious about the same thing for a while, so I was very interested in that article. HTH

The dish works extremely well if it is a "D" shape or better a mirror of the combustion chamber so you still have proper quench. Otherwise the most effecient chamber is the so called "heart" or "kidney" shape with a flattop.

Wolfplace, that's exactly correct, according to the article. I should have used "reverse dome" instead of dish, which is the way I try to always refer to them. I've seen a couple that used the valve reliefs to actually create much of a heart shaped reverse dome and the quench area of the piston is almost a mirror image of the quench area on the head. That looks to me like it should work well, but I've never seen a test comparing this to a common reverse dome. GM used dish tops on a lot of their 400's that killed the quench area altogether.

Thanks for your tips and advice. Some of you may have seen me talk of my plans to make a really nice 496 that can run on 87, so I'm just trying to gather as much info as I can. Thanks again.

With a BB you may need domes. However, with the cubes you have they wouldn't need to be big, if they are even needed. I don't know how much choice you have in chamber shape with a BB.

I don't normally jump on the magazine quoting thing but I saw a test on a 383 quite a few years back.They tried to keep everything as equal as they could,they changed the pistons for eack combo to keep the compression equal.
I believe they were rewarded with 20 across the board.TQ and HP.

I think I still have the mag and I will try to find it.