Ralf K posted this fine shot of a home built Allard hot rod sporting a Ford V8 with the legendary Ardun hemi heads. These heads were designed and built by Zora Arkus Duntov and his brother Yura, hence the “Ardun” name for their enterprise. They were designed in 1947, and gave a huge boost in power to the Ford flathead V8. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt in 1949, hence the rarity of these heads.
This home built hot rod is interesting, because it is a rather close copy of the Allard J2X, which was available at the time with a Ford/Ardun V8 engine, as ZAD had joined Sidney Allard’s company, prior to his moving to Chevrolet in 1953 to head up the development of the Corvette.
Here’s the model for this hot rod, the Allard J2X, which was of course British, despite its dependence on many Ford parts.
And here’s the Ardun/Ford V8 nestled in its engine compartment.
The Ardun heads were of course classic hemi heads, with hemispherical combustion chambers and inclined valves, as first used on the 1903 Premier racer. (I’m still planning a post on a definitive answer to who was the original inventor of the hemi head). Aftermarket heads like these had been common for Ford T and A engines in the teens and twenties, but the Depression put a crimp on the aftermarket for expensive components. Given the near ubiquity of Ford flathead V8s in all sorts of use, it rather made sense to pursue this, but presumably the costs to build these fine aluminum heads was too much for the market.
And yes, it appears trucks were a target for the Ardun heads, which makes sense given the power needs of trucks and the relatively low output of mass-market truck engines.
Awesome home built! The nose is a little awkward but since pretty much everything Sydney Allard did was little more than home built (and I mean that in the most respectful way, considering his accomplishments) it’s a great car to be inspired by.
Thanks to my Uncle’s stack of old Rod & Custom magazines I was very well acquainted with ARDUN heads during my teen years in the 1980’s. I was perplexed how my fellow car crazy friends didn’t know a thing about them.
Interestingly, you can buy new ones again:
http://www.ardun.com/
Imagine how much different the postwar world would have been if someone at Ford had seen these ARDUN heads and rushed into HFII’s office shouting “Hire this guy!” Duntov at work promoting performance in Ford engineering in the late 1940s would have changed the course of automotive history in a big way.
What a great what-if. I wonder what a factory Ford or Mercury with Ardun heads would have been like. It would have sold well to the moonshiners.
Though I hate to think of a world without Corvettes.
Barnfinds has a post on a ’48 Mercury convertible with Ardun heads and a Judson supercharger.
Maybe I’m missing something, but how do you put an overhead valve hemi head on a flathead engine? What happens to the original valves in the block?
Looks like longer pushrods extend up into the head where they operate rocker arms. See the drawing in the last picture. The Ardun head blocks off the flathead valve ports.
The valves are replaced by pushrods. And the ports are just covered over by the new head.
Take a close look at the cross section below. The push rod on the left side is where the valve was before.
Clever!
This looks more like a “special” instead of a traditional hot rod. After WWII many hot rodders built homemade “specials” to compete in sports car racing. They had to conform to certain specifications, such as they had to have effective fenders, and an accessible on board spare tire. Probably he best known was Max Balchowski’s Old Yeller. There were three built, each more refined than the preceding model.
In the 1940s, the term ‘hot rod” had a wider application than just cars intended mainly for straight line acceleration. Hot rods back then were designed to have better handling and braking too; in other words, sports cars. Or specials, if you like.
Cotton Werksman of Barrington, IL built a great Ardun-powered very innovative T-bucket in the late 60’s-early 70’s.
What a surprise that while doing a search for articles in Hot Rod magazine on Allards I would stumble onto this site with a photo of my fathers Hot Rod!
My dad built this car right out of high school after seeing Allards on the showroom floor at a local dealership.
Here’s a link to an older article (page 6) in The Allard Register about the car and how it was built. And yep, all these years later and he still owns it!
https://static.squarespace.com/static/5472bc55e4b00bea36c48ea9/5483edf9e4b09444e0825093/5483edf9e4b09444e0825098/1239254242757/50_Allard_Register_Summ08c.pdf