The Valiant debuted an all-new 6-cylinder overhead-valve engine, the famous Slant-Six. Its inline cylinders were uniquely canted 30° to the right (passenger side), permitting a lower hoodline. The water pump was shifted from front to alongside, shortening engine length. And an efficient long-branch individual-runner intake manifold was fitted, an advance that benefited from Chrysler's pioneering work in tuned intakes. The Slant-6 produced both more power and better economy than similar American made economy straight sixes, and it soon gained a reputation for dependability. Project Engineer Willem Weertman and his team had designed a simple yet robust workhorse, from its four-main forged crankshaft to a simplified "mechanical" valve train. Block and head castings were unusually thick because both were intended to be cast in either iron or aluminum with the same tooling. Although volume casting techniques of the era could not yet reliably produce complex head castings in aluminum, over 50,000 die-cast aluminum-block versions of the engine were produced between late 1961 and early 1963 and sold as extra-cost options.