Imagine the thrill of walking through the junkyard and popping the hood of a '69 Camaro and discovering an aluminum-block ZL1 427 Rat motor. Well it just happened to me-with some slight adjustments to the basic facts of the situation. Make that Camaro a '62 Plymouth Valiant and the Rat motor a 225 Slant Six and you're on target. Before you put me in the group of guys who brag about the "hot chick" they picked up while drunk in Tijuana, know that this wasn't just any old Slant Six I scored. No way. It's one of the 50,000 or so aluminum-block versions made in the '61 and '62 model years. When you consider that Chrysler made over 12 million cast-iron Slant Six motors between 1960 and 1991, scoring an aluminum-block version in the yard today really is like finding a needle in a haystack, no tequila goggles required.
The original owner of this V200 four-door sedan paid $47.35 for option code 502, the aluminum-block Slant Six. Aside from the block material, the engine was identical to the 145hp iron-block Slant Six but weighed 66 pounds less. | 
The free-standing cylinder bores and open deck are instant aluminum-only identification details. If the head is in place, there will be no freeze plugs in the driver side of the block; iron blocks have several. | 
Because somebody had already removed the head, intake, and exhaust, extraction was a piece of cake. Most yards have cherry pickers for rent like this one at $20 an hour (refunded if you bring it back within 60 minutes). |
After pressure washing, the factory red paint and brushed cylinder sizing marks are visible. This is block number 33997 from a production run of around 50,000 units. High cost, casting flaws, and low consumer demand doomed the alloy block after 1962. | 
Not all Slant Sixes are boring. Here's a Clifford Hyper-Pak-fortified aluminum block 225 that'll put a 3,000-pound A-body in the low 14s on pump gas. It is block number 49292. So far I've found three alloy Slant Sixes in SoCal junkyards, but no ZL1s. Special thanks to A-100 Jeff for his help finding this latest score. | |