BIG HORSEPOWER GAINS with Small Block Chevy Vortec Cylinder Heads!

this time on vaughn revivals we save a set of small box chevy vortex cylinder heads from going to the junkyard and turn them into major horsepower gains [Music] what do we have here must be some some hooligans hey wanna go for riding my square body thank you so if you can cast your mind back to when we scored that vortex small block chevy 350 that we pulled out of a field it also had a set of 906 vortec cylinder heads on it and the vortech heads are arguably the best oem cast heads that you can put on an engine and i decided that we need to revive this set and put them on an engine so we're magnaflexing this head here and as you can see we have a crack here which this is a typical spot for them to crack but then it also is cracked up here some of the dust didn't stay there but uh you get a we had a light here i'll be able to show you but it actually cracks down in here and goes down we're not sure how far it goes up but from what i'm being told there's this is pretty much just a solid wall the only concern is if it splits it'll go this way end up in the uh by the exhaust valve um so we don't want to do that so basically we're gonna we're gonna drill this out and we're gonna put a brass fitting in here to try to stop any coolant leak from coming through this column passage and then we're also gonna pin it here to stop the crack from um any of that happening so after that should be good and these heads are going to be usable and we'll be telling you what this is going to be going on because we changed some plans a little bit because i'm a goof next we pulled out our pres-in studs and cut down our stud bosses to upgrade to a screw-in stud we're going to go with a 3 8 screw instead and this is going to allow for a much higher lift cam next thing we did was cut down our guides this is going to help us with our valve spring to be able to put a bigger valve spring in that's also going to allow for a bigger lift cam next of course we honed our guides this is going to allow for clearance for our actual valve through the cylinder head it's kind of important to actually make sure that they're clearance correctly so that when the valve actually heats and expands that it won't bind up in the actual guide after that it got a little interesting because through conversations with joe over at the machine shop he actually showed me how to do a rough bull blend job and this was the first time i ever did any sort of porting on a cylinder head and we did it before the valve job specifically in case if i messed anything up usually all of your bull bun jobs and anything with uh porting your heads is usually done after the valve job um because you actually need to have your valves cut in order to know how much material you can take away from the cylinder head but because it was my first time doing it we decided that it was a better idea just to allow me to bull blend first just so i got used to what it was actually like to do it then we actually cut our valves and i went back in and fixed whatever the valve job misplaced and then recorrected it and we full blended these cylinder heads all right now that we're done with the burr i'm just going to go back through and polish them up with this guy real quick kind of smooths everything out makes it nice [Music] so basically you're saying is we're gonna touch it up more and fix that we're gonna fix it yeah there you go that's what it's all about [Music] because someone will comment about that and how the concentricity is out yep yeah yeah but it's well it's in industry uh yeah standards right for our valves i ended up buying brand new stock replacements just because the old ones were pretty rusty um the stock size valves in the small black chevy vortech heads is a 194 intake and a 150 exhaust then next we fixed the crack in our coolant passage on our one cylinder head [Music] would actually fill up with coin right like the whole entire head because over here it's that's those are all possible everything is coolant that you any of these passages here are all coolant so you could technically have coolant on the back side between these two things and if it creeped up through the crack you know then it could possibly come to the surface but the gasket's gonna seal that completely seal it might cool use to see how that it's not gonna well mind you it's not gonna actually fully seat but oh covers it up completely completely covers it up it's like it's not even there it is that's why i don't mind making that repair because yeah ever see it coming back to bite yet yep we've took care of any issues that could possibly this crack isn't going to go anymore this crack it's just there the only way the only way it can go down you know but yeah it's highly unlikely it'll travel that far yeah for at least the time that it's what i would tell you what will happen is it's going to go down and this this casting line right here it'll probably split no we'll want to probably either tear off that way or the other way but that's going to it's going to be okay cool so they're going to be usable on this head the intakes are done and we have a little bit of hangover left so um you hate you hate the hangovers they're not good so we're gonna take care of them by running them down a bit i think is that one done kind of ish oh no that's no that one's not done that one's not done the one that you did is uh one is the one middle one right the one without the big lip okay well no there's one here that looked like it was like half oh i'm a that's when i started on okay nope we're good it's okay it's okay i'm just being stupid you just you let me you let me do my thing you can kind of see that shiny edge there that's basically what we're getting rid of because when you know the air kind of comes out to go do into the other thing that's kind of a it's actually a really nasty lip so after we got done finishing our bull blend job and also fixing the crack on our one cylinder head it was time to actually surface our cylinder heads these vortex cylinder heads originally from the factory the 906s were originally a 64cc chamber size we end up taking 15 thousands off of the actual cylinder head which is basically actually going to make the chamber size smaller which is actually going to directly affect our compression it's actually going to raise it because the smaller you make your combustion chamber the more what i like to call squeeze between the um the stroke of the piston coming up to the top of the cylinder um basically the smaller you make that area um the more compression you actually have so roughly within taking 15 thousands off we went from the original 64cc chamber to a 62cc chamber and that's going to raise our compression which is also going to help us make a little more horsepower so we got them both wiped down pretty good i just used some brake cleaner with with a rag usually keep wiping until the rack comes up clean um half of this one's reasonably clean um so they're pretty much good and ready to go we're going to tape off our guides and our studs and pretty much everything where all of our valve stuff is going to happen we don't want to get any paint down in there i do want to paint the the edge of the rail though so we are going to be like taping off a section of this we're also going to tape off our intake and our exhaust ports just because we really don't want to get any paint in there either and obviously we don't have to worry about our deck surface because it is sitting on the cardboard and i'm not going to remove it from the cardboard so we'll let that sit on there so none of that none of the paint will get on our deck surface but besides that let's tape it up and then get ready to paint it um i don't remember fully i know that when we painted the uh the budget build 350 um that video we can actually link it up here if you want to go check that out um we brought it home it was pretty crusty we cleaned it up and painted it i went out and bought vht paint um the only problem is i can't remember this can happen to be chevy orange red i can't remember if we painted that engine chevy orange or chevy orange red and uh this was sitting on the shelf and i went to the store and i said hey i'm gonna buy another can of uh the opposite color and i'm gonna test them both out to see which one it actually was and uh funny story i i bought the can i brought it home and and i bought a second can of the chevy orange red so we got two of them so that's cool i guess that's what we're going with and we also have um a little bit of high heat primer i didn't prime the uh i didn't spray any primer on the engine when we painted the engine um but we're here and these heads uh they're nice fresh bare metal so let's you know let's throw some primer down on them uh too just to kind of help it out but let's tape this off and then we'll start spraying so we got it all pretty much taped up covered up stuffed some rags in our intake ports and our exhaust ports here on the back um and then i had a piece of cardboard that i cut out that kind of fit in nicely so i can still paint the the top valve cover rail there because these are actually machined nice and flat so i would like to get some paint on those but didn't want to get too much into where everything goes down with our valve gm out tree and stuff but yeah i guess at this point we're gonna we're gonna blast it probably do two coats of primer and then we'll uh and then we'll douse it with probably two or three coats of uh the actual paint make sure it actually spray okay it is all right just do a nice light first coating on them yeah we'll let that sit for a few minutes so we got our two coats of primer on and set pretty good it actually looks pretty good i'm happy with that i did check i sprayed this uh this vht red orange on a piece of cardboard and checked it against the color of the engine in the in the square body and you know what it looks it's it's okay we're painting it yeah that's that's what's happening so we're gonna go with a nice light first coat again and then like i said i probably do probably do three coats on these [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] you can tell just by looking at them now yeah so yours okay are basically a hundred thousands bigger than that wire so basically well because what does the actual retaining ring like what does that even they call it damper it helps to dampen [Music] like valtryen harmonics and stuff but i i feel like it's like an it's like an old school thing yeah a lot of them got away from that anymore and like you can buy a spring if we bought you a vortex specific spring it's basically this spring without that in the middle yep and instead of being 40 they're 120. so you might as well just buy the old ones and take out the yes yeah because you end up in the same place so with this you see where 7 81 and you're 850. so there's definitely wouldn't work it's an impossible mission okay so one we could have machined these to accept this but that would be more money yeah or we could have bought the vortex specific springs which also would have been more money and the whole point was or you take five minutes and pull these out of here and you call it a day did it work better with the needle noses or oh did i never give you this here no no no no you never get it out that far you can just grab it here here let me make you feel really bad now then you just grab this and twist it sorry i brought them out but you never gave them to me you never mentioned anything about them either yeah cool i still have one more joe oh dude yeah where are you going bring it back yeah because all you got to do is work the one side out and then you can yeah yeah you never get it i've been pulling them out of the screwdriver the whole time up next it was time to put on our valve seals springs retainers and locks we ended up reusing the retainers and locks and we also ended up reusing our 1.5 stamped steel rocker arms to help keep the cost down on the cylinder heads at that point it was time to check our coil bind on our valve springs this ensures that the cam that we're using isn't going to bind up our valve spring coils then we just continue to work through the rest of them at this point we assembled our cylinder heads by putting our valve springs and our retainers and locks on after that we actually put our vortex cylinder heads on the engine that these heads are going to be going on and checked our piston to valve clearance and we also got our push rod length all this plays more of a role in our engine build but i figure it was important to mention that we did it in this video just to explain what we did as those are actual crucial steps that are needed to be taken to ensure that our components and our engine when it's all combined together will actually work properly and allow the engine to run right and operate as it should without any issues now i know that some people might actually make comments saying well you could have done this this or this differently we could have put bigger valves in it we could have put different springs in it and we could have put roller rockers on it and a bunch of other upgrades that you can actually do to these heads to make them perform even better but a lot of it came down to just trying to be budget conscious and budget friendly mostly because the cylinder heads are actually be going on our budget build uh small box chevy that you've seen on the channel before and the whole idea is to try to keep it somewhat budget friendly now a lot of people might argue well the price that it actually took to completely rebuild these heads you could have had yourself into a set of uh aluminum heads or you could have had a set of afr enforcer heads and you could have just thrown them on the engine and that's true but the argument that i'd like to make is that these heads were professionally done at a machine shop also with that being said too all the components that were used are actually good components there's good guides in this there's good valves in this there's good valve springs in this we honed the guides to a specific clearance we actually cut the valve job and checked our valve concentricity and got it well within industry standards all those stuff are actually good components when you buy some of these other aluminum cylinder heads that are a lot cheaper like the afr enforcers all the valves your valve springs your retainers your guides all that stuff is cheap chinese garbage in my opinion and also with that being said as well a lot of the stuff that not a lot of people overlook but those like guide clearances and stuff like that that's not looked at when they're just banging them out at a factory it's okay we're gonna bore the guide clearance to this size or these components are gonna be made to this uh standard quality and basically we're just gonna push them out the door and you're gonna buy them you're gonna bolt them to your head and mind you this engine could run for you know five years and then all of a sudden you know the thing's not running right because it wiped out a set of guides and in your head you're going oh well you know they've been on the engine for five years even though it's your hot rod and you've only drove it like 2000 miles within the past you know five years so that's why i kind of think it's really important in conversations between me and joe that it is kind of crucial and honestly let's be honest the price of aluminum aftermarket heads is actually going up through the roof and getting these aftermarket parts is getting harder because everything's on back order and i think a popular trend that we're going to be seeing uh in the future is people returning to rebuilding cast cylinder heads so that's kind of the reason why i wanted to put this video together plus yet again we got to save a set of cylinder heads from going to the boneyard and being crushed up and sent over to china to you know produce your garbage aluminum cylinder heads and there you have it that is a complete build up of our 906 small block chevy vortec cylinder heads i just wanted to say this wasn't quite the video i wanted to bring to you i wish it was a little bit more in depth but unfortunately with time and everything just didn't get all the pieces together that i actually wanted to get together for you guys we do have another video coming up with another cast set of small block chevy heads that i want to go a little bit more in depth with and maybe get a little bit more technical this was just a quick little video to show you guys that we revived a set of small block chevy vortex cylinder heads i have to give a big thank you to joe for opening his doors and letting me come into the machine shop he's taken a lot of time out of his schedule to help educate me and actually allow me to come into his own shop and actually be able to work on my own little projects and it's been really really awesome and i really do appreciate it so joe thank you we have a lot more awesome projects coming out of that shop with the help of joe so i'm super excited and at this point they are ready to basically get tossed on the engine there's a few more things we got to do the studs um but actually screw in here those need to be those are going to get a little bit of sealant on them just because they're cooling passes one up but that's all going to happen when they go on the motor but they're done and they're ready to go on so hope you did enjoy this video and uh stay tuned because these are going on something and it's going to be it's going to be pretty good three months to get this hot dog we got three months to get this square body chevy ready hi bud hi bud hi hi everybody meet dante i'm a good boy right yeah good boy

Channel: Boneyard Revivals

Views: 67,288

Keywords: 906 small block chevy vortec heads, small block chevy vortec heads, Budget build Chevy 350, Budget build small block Chevy, Cheep Chevy 350, Chevy 350, Small block Chevy 350 build, chevy, square body chevy, engine build, 350 small block chevy engine build, How to pull a small block Chevy engine apart, Small block Chevy Vortec 350, Chevy Vortec, Chevy Vortec 350 build, Chevy Vortec eningine, Chevy Vortec 5.7, Building a Chevy 5.7L Vortec, chevy vortec engine, vortec heads

Id: vSX-BlTk8ig

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022