I know this has been discussed in a few threads, but I'm still not sure,
I live in tenerife, Canary Islands and have aquired an '89 Mazda 323 1.8 16v SOHC, but the cylinder head is split and isn't repairable.
The problem is there are only 4 scrap yards on tenerife and there are no SOHC 323's in any of them, but there are 2 DOHC 1.8 16v's.
I'm not interested in any performance gains or fitting turbos, I just want the cheapest option to get my car back on the road, and shipping a SOHC head from the UK where I could get one easily would likely be more expensive than getting a DOHC one from here, even if I had to replace the manifolds and ECU.
The engine no. on the block is BP117561
and on the SOHC head is stamped BP01.
The main issue I can see other than the size and shape, would be the cambelt tensioner pullies, the DOHC understandably has 2 where mine only has 1.
I will remove this thread once I'm certain, as it has been discussed, but I am unclear from reading other threads whether it will work for my engine.

Many Thanks.

 

Yes it will work. However the combination of the SOHC short block and the DOHC head will result in a lower compression ratio. You would do well to just swap the entire DOHC engines plus the appropriate hardware that goes along with them IE the harness, ECU manifolds etc.....

 

I don't have the facilities to swap a complete engine, it was awkward enough getting the head off.
And what about the tensioner pullies, as far as I can tell, my block will only take one.