[Seth Swoboda]

I think we have all given good ideas as to what may be causing the problem. I very recently had this problem on an 8ba engine with aluminum Offenhauser heads. I found out that do to my neglect to recheck head torque there was a compression leak. Improperly torqued heads caused the overheating issue. I pulled the heads, had a machine shop lightly clean the head surface. I cleaned the deck of the engine, bought new studs and head gaskets and reassembled. I re-torqued the heads through 4 heat cycles to 45 lbs. So far no overheating. My mechanical temperature gauge says I'm running 180 degrees tops. So far so good. It was an expensive lesson that I learned the hard way. I re-torqued the heads on my other flatheads (all stock with cast iron heads) just for piece of mind. Anyway, this has been my experience with a similar problem. This is what I did to remedy the situation. All other suggestions are relevant and worth checking into also.