don,
did you have your heads flow tested?
i would agree that your heads are 88cc instead of 78cc. if they milled that much off your heads they would have turned into closed chamber. plus it would have been a bugger getting your intake to fit.
two years ago a built a street 440 for my '64 fury that made 549.6 HP @ 5600 and 611 ft-lis torque @ 4400. i used K1 rods and ross pistons for a compression ration of 10.36:1 which is perfect for non-ethanol pump gas. i am using aluminum heads -- they are the mopar aluminum closed chamber 452 heads (essentially they are edelbrock performer RPM with straight plugs). where i'm going with this is -- does it make more sense investing in a good set of aluminum heads? you can run more compression (read more HP) and they will work fine for the street. thoughts?