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Before the 426 Hemi became the engine everyone associates with the name, Dodge was quietly running two completely different cylinder head designs side by side through the 1950s — a genuine hemispherical head and a cheaper poly compromise, often wearing nearly identical badging. Telling them apart today comes down to details as small as a dimple stamped into a valve cover. Read on to find out how to actually identify which engine is under the hood.
The combustion chamber that made Chrysler famous was never Chrysler’s invention, and the company’s first hemispherical engine was not designed for a car at all. It was drawn for a fighter plane, then refined in a tank, and it reached showrooms in 1951 wearing a name that had nothing to do with geometry. Read on to find out how a wartime experiment became the most valuable four letters in American performance.
Ford built the FE 427 Cammer to solve one problem: Chrysler’s 426 Hemi was dominating NASCAR, and a conventional block wasn’t going to catch it. The side-oiler engine replaced a normal camshaft with an idler shaft and a six-foot timing chain driving twin overhead cams, hollow sodium-filled exhaust valves, and a hemispherical combustion chamber Ford couldn’t even call a Hemi because Chrysler owned the name. Sold as a crate engine in 1968, the dual-carb version made 657 horsepower for $2,350. Read on for how Ford’s FE family evolved from Mercury’s 410 to this NASCAR-killer.
Chrysler’s third-generation Hemi introduced a two-spark-plug-per-cylinder ignition system and eventually spawned everything from a fuel-saving 5.7-liter truck engine to a 590-horsepower 426-cubic-inch showstopper. Along the way, displacements ranged from 5.7 to 6.4 liters, with technologies like MDS cylinder deactivation and variable crankshaft timing added throughout its run. Read on to find out how one ignition change led to an entire engine family.