How to get more power out of your small Block Ford

hey welcome back everybody uh today i want to talk to you about some ford stuff that is going on here so my buddy charlie has a 68 mustang with a 289 it's a it's the original engine in the car he had some overheating problems and he put a four core radiator in it and he put extra fans on it and he did everything he could think of and he still had this overheating issue so he pulled the heads off to look at the gaskets and inspect the heads didn't really see anything obvious well now we're at the point where the engine's coming out of the car we're gonna we're you know it's like the can of worms deal so we're pulling the the engine out but what i want to talk to you about today is a head upgrade so the ford small block heads the early head like this one we have here we'll look at it here in a minute uh for lack of a better word they were pretty crappy uh not really the best head for any kind of performance uh they were okay he's got the open chamber 289 head i ran the compression ratio numbers and he's got like 8.2 to 1 compression or something like that it was just a really really low compression deal so we want to while we got this thing out we're going to check out the block and make sure it's not cracked and see if the water jackets are clogged and we're going to clean the whole thing up and probably bore it and all that stuff but we're going to upgrade the heads and i want to talk to you about a set of heads that you can find relatively easily these days and they are a big upgrade from the stock heads all right so this is a gt40p head now with some characteristics on this thing and the thing is this particular cylinder head came out in uh the 90s and it was found actually believe it or not on a lot of ford explorers and mercury mountaineers they also made another head called a gt40 so there is a difference between the gt40p and the gt40 so first of all if you look at the gt40 head and i don't have one here unfortunately but the gt40 head will simply say gt40 so if we take a close look at the p head it will actually say gt40p on it and it also has a ap and some other locations out here on the outside of the head near the spark plug hole it'll say gtp so that's gt40p and it also has a p right on this corner so that's a gt40p head not the same as just a plain gt40 head the difference is on the gt40 head you won't see the p here you won't see uh it'll just say gt40 all right so here's the dealio if we take a look at the early 289 302 head which is what this is here this is actually a 302 head but it's the same casting number as we took off of the 289 it just doesn't say 302 it says 289 but they're identical they're identical heads it has a really big chamber here and i ran the numbers and like i said it's like eight to one compression the the gt40 number one it has a much smaller combustion chamber i've measured them and they come out anywhere from 58 to like 61 cc's they vary slightly but we say an average of about 60 cc's as opposed to like 68 cc's here so this is gonna give us a significant jump in compression put us right around nine to one which is perfect for a street motor with cast heads the other issue here is this the the early 302 factory heads just had really really crappy intake ports i mean they they they did not flow i've put these on the flow bench many times and the numbers are just absolutely pathetic the gt40 flow it has a much larger port here it has a modern port design these are a bit of an archaic port design and if you measure these you find out that the gt40 port is quite a bit wider and they actually raise the port slightly so that's that's the measurement of that gt40 port there if i compare it over here to the the early port you can see we've got a quite a bit larger port there right this is quite a bit wider so these have a lot more flow capability than the early heads and honestly i mean when you put these on the flow bench and you look at the flow numbers and you compare them to like an afr or you know an edelbrock or something the numbers don't look all that impressive on the gt40 and the gt40p heads until you look at the flow numbers on the stock heads and compare them then you're like oh my goodness it's a dramatic increase so so this this old um ford small block head that they've been using for years even all the way up to like the e7 heads the e7 heads weren't any better than these there is one head that's pretty good from the factory in the early days and that was the 1970 and 6970 351 the c9 and the doe 351 heads i'll say 351 here they were decent but they actually weren't quite as good as the gt40p heads these are a little bit better so we've got a much more efficient chamber here that creates a lot more turbulence and it's actually uh smaller so we got more quint uh we got more quench area here instead of having this big open chamber so it's just a much better design larger ports now the valves um in the gt40 head were actually larger on the exhaust side than the gt40p this has a smaller valve but we're gonna remedy that these and i'm gonna really tick off the ford guys now these are 350 chevy valves so what we're going to do the one inch 840 intake that goes in here we're going to retrofit this bigger intake and we're going to cut the throat down here and do a little bit of unshrouding and we're going to go ahead and fit the bigger 350 chevy valves in here and do the the the work that's required for unshrouding these and getting this to work and we're also going to do just a tiny bit of cleanup on the ports we're not going to fully port these basically what we're doing is we want this 289 and you can do this on a 302 or 351 we just want to upgrade the the old 289 and make it better and honestly i mean if you guys i've got a bunch of videos on chevy vortech heads how you take the early chevy 350 heads and get rid of them and you put vortex on the the gt40 head is the vortec head upgrade of the ford and mustang world ford engines one of the nice things about forts like so like uh it's 302 cubic inches or 289 cubic inches the difference between a 289 and 302 is is the stroke the 289 has a little bit shorter stroke but what i love about fords and what is just so good about these engines is is ford engineers and and when ford designed these engines the 289 the 302 and the 351 they kept a four inch bore now if you look at the 305 chevy or the 318 chrysler what they did is instead of keeping the board the same and shortening the stroke they made a much smaller bore that's one of the really big disadvantages of a 318 chrysler or 305 chevy is they get this little dinky bore in this long stroke like on a 350 or 305 chevy they kept the stroke the same as the 350 and made the bore smaller well if you know anything about any kind of performance you don't want a small bore the the bigger the bore the better a good example is this 383 chrysler here this the 383 big block was 383 cubic inches but they kept the big bore right has a big giant bore but a really short stroke so it's a phenomenally good performing engine it's actually a big block that thinks it's a small block it has the torque of a big block but it revs like a small block so that torque in large part and that grunt that that engine has guys comes from that big bore so the the fantastic thing about the 289 and the 302 is they have a four inch board it's the same size boar is a 350 chevy or 351 they just put a shorter stroke in like i said so the problem is they choked it off with these crappy heads now since you got a four inch bore there if you put a good head on it and again i realize there's aftermarket heads you can buy you know edelbrock afr dart or whatever but you know you're talking about a lot of money there my buddy charlie is kind of on a budget and he didn't really even he he was ready to rebuild it with the stock engines he's not doesn't want a race car but i talked them into the gt40p heads because we got them cheap i think we paid 175 bucks for these cores and then of course we got a few hundred dollars into the parts but i mean nowhere near what you're going to pay for a set of aftermarket heads and he was not prepared to do that he was just going to go with the stock heads and do a basic valve job rather than spend you know a thousand fifteen hundred bucks on a set of heads he's not doing that so we're only going to have and obviously since it's my buddy the labor's kind of a freebie for him so he's not going to have that much into these just parts right but i figured since i'm doing them i might as well make a video because i know a lot of guys this is a great upgrade if you got a small block ford even a late model later model in a fox body or something with the e7 heads these are so much better this is the budget upgrade that you want you're bolting on any depending on what you have to begin with you're bolting on anywhere from 30 to 50 horsepower with these heads now we're going to upgrade these like i said put that bigger valve in there do some unshrouding we want to make these things breathe [Music] as well as they possibly can so so so that's the deal on these now the only other thing i would mention is that and this is something you got to watch out for here and that is the spark plug angle now the spark plug angle comes in and it's pretty dramatic on most of the stock fords if you look at the spark plug angle on the gt40 head they actually moved it over it's more of a straight shot it's not laid over like this it comes in this way and it does require a special set of exhaust manifolds or headers uh the first swap i did with a set of these heads on an early mustang is is man i i i felt like i opened a can of worms because i couldn't find a set of headers that would actually fit the headers the the the gt40ps do need a special set of headers however um there's a couple companies out there that have really solved this problem and i've done you know probably a dozen or so of these swaps and used the headers successfully so the old problem of not being able to find headers has kind of been solved there's a company out there called mac headers and there's also another one called bbk both of those companies make a ceramic coated header that fits with the gt40 heads it works really well the only thing other thing you got to do is you got to get spark plug wires that have a 90 degree angle on them instead of the straight angle but other than that they actually have shorty headers and long tubes work really well so so that's the strategy here i'm going to load these up and take them over to the cylinder head shop where we got all the equipment for doing this and i'll kind of walk you through a few upgrades that we do on these now the other thing is if you look at the early 289 heads they have a press-in rocker stead well we all know the press and rocker studs are for grandma right so normally what we do is we pull those out and we thread them and we put a screw in stud and maybe a guide plate in there depending on what we're doing uh what we're gonna do on these heads rather now these heads have a bolt down rocker just like the e7s and the and the d8s and all those they had they had a pedestal mount rocker that was bolt down and it's a non-adjustable valve train you can use those on the early 289. i've done it however we don't have a set of rockers that are bolt down i literally don't have a set i've got all kinds of ford heads laying around here somewhere i looked out in the in the in the core shed earlier and i've probably got 40 or 50 sets of these small block ford heads and some of the e7's and stuff not one single set of rocker rooms i've used them all up so the bolt down rockers rather than buying bolt down rockers what you can do on these is you can actually okay so there's a couple ways they have a crossover stud because the the bolt down rocker here it is a 5 16 threaded hole so they have a stud that's 3 8 on top for your rocker and then it has a 5 16 screw in area here we've already got a set of studs that are 7 16 down here and 3 8 up here well the problem is this is way smaller this is 5 16. so rather than buy the swap studs with the 5 16 lower end here because actually if you look at those studs man they're pretty expensive and we just happen to have these and i've done this before so what i'm going to do is once i get this set up i'm going to drill these out and i'm going to re-tap them to 7 16 and just put the one thing i don't like about the swap stud that they have that that bolts into the existing hole here is this or this 5 16 stud here this bolt hole it's kind of a wimpy little stud i mean it's a little tiny 5 16 i don't like that i want to i want to i'm going to open these up and i'm going to tap them to 7 16 so i can get that good beefy 7 16 base in here and that just makes the rocker and the stud a lot more stable so we're going to set this up on the seat and guide machine anyway we might as well pour those out throw them out and trap them now the other thing is like if you get a set of these heads that are loaded you get them in the in the bone yard and again the ford explorers you know what you're looking for one of the things that you need to look for here and i'll show you how to identify these i can highlight this too if i need to on the end of the head here for a gt40 head you're gonna see three vertical bars on the gt40p head you're gonna see one two three four and i've highlighted those with a metal marker you're gonna see four vertical bars so when you're at the wrecking yard and you're looking for a set of the gt40 or gt40p heads those bars you want to look on the end of the head for the three or four bars believe it or not there's not a lot of people out there that that really know about these heads at least not as much as know about the vortech heads for the chevys so you can still find these you want to look at the the 90s through i think early 2000s ford explorers the old square body explorers and if it's a 302 powered vehicle look at the heads and see if they have those bars on if they do you can probably pick those heads up pretty cheap because most most uh most wrecking yards just sell them like i said i bought these magnaflux and blasted and cleaned and ready to go for 175 bucks for the course so and and that's really cheap for being able to bolt on 30 to 50 horsepower all right so the other thing is the valve springs the valve springs that are on the gt40 and the gt40p heads for the factory are garbage okay you've got to update this now we've bought a new set of um engine pro valve springs here and and these springs we did spend some money on these these are about 100 bucks but valve springs are critically important you guys and these are going to give me a uh about a a 550 lift capability uh uh the cam shaft that we're doing in this 289 we are doing a retrofit roller cam shaft we're getting rid of that flat tap nonsense and we're putting a decent roller cam now it's not a crazy cam so like i said my buddy charlie he's like my age he doesn't want some big radical cam that you know like i told him and he agrees with it when you're doing these old classic cars now anymore it doesn't really make sense at least in my opinion to build some really nasty street rod with a big radical cam and everything else i mean you can do that if you want but the fact of the matter is is that this mustang has stock suspension i mean it's just a it's basically a stock car he doesn't want something crazy he wants to be able to drive it he wants a smooth idol you know he and i totally understand that and the reason being is you know the late model cars today if you look the challengers and the chargers and the corvettes and all these all these cars even some of the pickup trucks everything nowadays is fast everything i mean who'd have thought you could buy a production car with 7 800 horsepower you know 30 years ago we thought that was insane right four or 500 horsepower is normal just for stock everyday plain jane you know cars the mustangs the the the camaros all these cars and with a little bit of a few upgrades you know you're you're into the 5 600 horsepower range so that's why i say everything nowadays is fast there's no reason to build an old street rod just so you can go fast when the newer cars so so my philosophy is let's upgrade it and make it decent but we don't you know we're not going to spend a ton of money and then of course if you build some big nasty motor then you got to upgrade your diff and you got to you got to do your transmission and you got to do your suspension and all that stuff he doesn't mess with all that nonsense so if you just have a stock plane jane small block ford let's put a roller cam in it that has a much better load profile it's going to be more efficient it's going to give us low to mid-range torque we're going to put a set of gt40 heads on let's put bigger valves and do a little bit of cleanup on the ports and you're going to have yourself a really potent little street car now it's not going to change the world but you're literally going to have you know 30 to 50 more horsepower in this case i think we're gonna be closer to 50 with all we're doing so if you rebuild the engine and you got 50 more horsepower than you had and the engine is streetable and it's everything works good that's pretty upgrade i would say that's a pretty good upgrade so and we're gonna do it cheap all right so i'll get over to the let's get these over to the other shop and we'll uh i'll start digging into these and show you what we're gonna do okay guys so what i've got here is is this is a 66 289 head which is very similar to what's on charlie's 289 this is a 68 but it's the same basic design they all have these press-in studs so what i want to do is i'm going to measure the height of this stud here because on the gt40 heads when we put the studs in we want to duplicate this we want this to be the same as what he's got so the valve train is not going to be an issue for us so we've got um one inch 625 so one inch 625 000 so that is my the height of my stud above the stud boss now what i've discovered on our gt40p head here is that i'm not going to have to i mean i don't mind machining these bosses down if i have to but the nice thing is is if we put our screw instead here with the jam nut and we compare it to the height of the stud it's almost exactly the same as the early 289 stud height this is just a little bit taller it's only about three or four threads taller and i don't mind the studs being slightly taller i'd rather have them too a little taller than too short so the nice thing is now you see that's a 7 16 stud and it obviously is not going to fit in there so we're going to have to drill that out and obviously tap it so so that's what i'm going to do first i'm going to get it set up for these studs and then i've got a nice hardened comp cams rocker stud it's going to make this rocker arm real stable in here so i'll get this set up and i'll show you how we do that one of the nice things about the ford setup too is the angle of the studs here on this machine surface is exactly the same as the the valve cover so basically you put your level on the valve cover surface and you center the head here and that puts the studs at the holes at the right angle so i can drill them and then at that point it's just a matter of drilling out your existing stud hole you can feel it when you get to the bottom of that bore so and also one of the things we want to make sure of here is that that hole is deep enough to accept our stud that is the depth of our hole there and you can see we got plenty of room for that stud so we're going to tap that hole now with a 7 16 and make it compatible for that bolt okay so i've tapped that all the way down to the bottom now i want to make sure we get all the chips out of there so there's our you can see the difference in those holes there's our screw in stud that's going to go in so now we've got instead of having that little tiny wimpy 5 16 we've got a hardened 3 8 stud and it's a great upgrade so i'm going to go ahead and do all these i won't do them on camera but you get the idea that's what we're going to end up with there and it's going to be a really nice valve train setup all right guys so this is our tool here and our tool has the correct angles for this now what we've done is we've we took our 194 valve we put it in a fixture and then we put our cutting tool in a fixture here and we located our angles here to match our new valve so this thing is going to go in and cut and and of course right here you can't see it from that camera angle right here where the spark plug boss comes down we're going to have to cut into some of that we're not going to get into it a crazy amount but we got to open this up a little bit for that bigger valve so we're just going to go in real slow and this tool is going to cut that [Applause] [Applause] now you're going to see that tool start to cut those angles all right so we just started getting into the 45 degree angle there for the the seat and of course we're gonna we're gonna finish that off with a finishing tool that's just a rough cut the other thing is one thing you'll notice is we got this lip down here we're gonna have to go in and address that too and we use a bull hog for that okay so we've made a tool change here now you can see the problem is we got a big lip down here we cut the angles up here the most important part of head flow is an inch below the valve and an inch above the valve so this this kind of stuff you can't just leave this this has to be addressed this is a bull hog cutter and you'll see we're going to go in real slow and we're going to take that lip out and also this cutter is actually a a ford it's designed for a ford head and it has the exact angle of that throat on the small block forward so we're duplicating the throat angle here which is a pretty big deal you want to keep that the same we're just going to go in and open that throat up get rid of that bottom lip okay take a look now we've basically cut the throat on this thing and we've eliminated pretty much all that lip now we do have a slight lip here i can't go any deeper here because i'm getting down near the guide the slight lip that we have here we have another cutter that we're going to go in and when we finish these seats up we'll knock that off of there but we've got our angle there and that actually opens us up to the point where our bigger valve is going to be effective that's how we do it now i'm going to go ahead and do all the rest of these we got to do the exhaust ports too because that valve is slightly bigger but it's the same process i'm going to get all these cut and machine and i'll come back and show you what they look like just initially here for our valve you can see so we've got a lot of room over here if you if now we got it's all unshrouded we got that whole area open so that and and the seat is pretty much where it needs to be because now we've located that seat where it needs to be we just need to do some finishing touches on here and seat that in and we and we got it same thing on the exhaust over here this this exhaust port's way too small so i'll get those done i'll come back and i'll show you what it looks like okay guys so here's where we're at i've gone through and i went ahead and cut the throats on all the intakes and the exhaust and the seat to its approximate location based on the valve size now obviously i mean we got this lip down here i have another tool i got to go in and just we're going to blend that in i don't really feel like i need to do all that on camera and then of course we got the machining marks here from our tools and again we're going to go in with an angled tool and we're just going to blend that and we're going to cut that until it blends in but this is basically what you're looking at you can see how much clearance we have we unshrouded the valve there and the nice thing about these gt40 heads is the valves over in this area of the chamber we actually got quite a bit of room over here we don't really shroud the valves even with a bigger valve on some heads like the 781 big block chevys we got to go in and like unshroud this area because it's so close but these look really good on the gt40 heads so so yeah they're looking good um we're gonna get the just get the seats finalized we're gonna do some finishing touches to blend them in and then that's about it for the valve job once we get the valve seated in and then we'll uh we'll move on to a couple other things i'm going to do a little bit of cleanup on the intake and exhaust ports and we'll talk about that but uh i'm gonna turn the camera off and finish up the seats on both of these and i'll come back okay so a couple more things i'd like to point out here guys one of the things that i want you to take a look at these ports here so this is a port that we just worked on so sometimes there's casting bumps or flaws and things like that this is one that we just went in with a dremel tool and a sanding cone and we smooth this out if you look at this other port here next to it we'll zoom in on this one you got that factory casting bump in there and that can actually disrupt the flow as it goes into the to the engine so you want to get rid of that and also these edges are pretty sharp here we got sharp edges sharp edges can catch air flow so if you look at the the finished board here we've gone in and gotten rid of that casting bump and chamfered all these edges here if you run your finger along you don't feel any sharp edges or anything it's nice and smooth now this isn't this isn't the same thing as porting and polishing that's a whole other deal but the transition point where the air goes into the engine it's a good idea to clean this up this is going to give our air a little more stability and actually will will help the flow numbers slightly so anything that you can do to help the air have a smooth transition is is something that should be done and then up top here another thing i wanted to point out here is this area of the spark plug boss where we had to take a a cutter and open this up you also want to take we took a sand cone and we deburred that whole thing you don't want any sharp edges here because that can actually if it's a sharp edge it can actually get hot and cause pre-ignition and detonation so and also our our transitions here we went ahead and smooth these out we got no sharp edges in here at all everything has been blended in so it's it's looking really good this area here where we cut the this larger on the spark plug boss there was a sharp edge right along here and then over here so we've got i i went in and i took a sanding cone and you want to de-burr all that we don't want any sharp edges here because that can actually create heat and lead to pre-ignition or detonation so we've gone in and chamfered and smoothed all this out and blended it and also we've blended all of our we got no sharp edges here we can't catch anything so that's pretty critical that all of this anything you can do to help give that airflow give the airflow a chance on the on the ports and also to deburr this is going to help another area that we can increase flow is on the valve if you look at the stock valve here it's got this 45 degree angle but there's there's a bit of an edge up here there's plenty of meat on this valve so what we do is we're going to go relieve that and we're going to relieve that back cut it's called back cutting the valve so we're going to come in at about a 30 degree angle here now we're going to relieve that that back portion of that valve there [Music] we're just going to go in and relieve that a little bit so now you can look at the back side of the valve and if i run my finger over that because the air is going to swirl in here and we want a smooth transition so we've gotten rid of all of that unevenness and that bump there it's called back cutting the valves and it helps the air flow around this valve better and it it does you'll pick up a few cfms takes a little extra time and effort to grind them but any little thing you can do to help that air get in there is going to help so that's another trick that we we use is uh back cutting the valves okay guys so what we've done here all of the prep work is pretty much done on this head if you look at the ports here we've gone in and smoothed all these transitions broke the edge here on the port now on the intake side we didn't polish these we used a rougher stone a rougher tool you don't want to polish the intake ports because you want a little bit of roughness there but you don't want casting flaws and bumps also went in with a sand cone you don't want any sharp edges down here because that can glow red hot during combustion and cause detonation so if you run your finger along here all this has been smoothed out with a sanding cone all sharp edges removed from the top of the seat where it was cut all the sharp edges are deburred and then of course on the exhaust side same thing this transitionary ear area about a half inch in all the way around put a chamfer on got rid of the sharp edge here so you want to give that air a fighting chance so that it can it can transition smoothly airflow does not like disruptions when it hits something a casting flaw or a bump it causes unstability and it causes a disruption and flow and once you do all that now it's just a matter of seating the valves in for the final time we're going to go in and make sure that everything's good but we're close we're really close we got a seat where it needs to be we just need to touch up those those i always touch up the the seats with a stone the reason i use a stone and a stone holder is i'll go in here with a stone and i'm just going to touch these i have a driver that goes on here we're just going to touch that with a stone and true it up because the stone is going to get rid of any imperfections that you might have the tool when you cut this with a tool on the machine it does a good job of getting your seat where it needs to be but getting this to seal with a steel cutter here uh i haven't had real good luck with that i don't know many shops that have you can do it but i noticed that when you vacuum test the head after cutting with a steel tool there's a little bit of leakage there now that goes away when the head heats up and the valve beds in i understand that but i'm going to go in and retouch these with a stone a very fine stone which is going to true that 45 degree angle up once we do that what i've noticed is when you vacuum test it you got absolutely zero leakage past that valve even without the valve spring on you just shut the valve and you vacuum test it after you've cut it with this there is no leakage that's the way that i like to do it just you don't have to you could use the cutter some shops do but i just like a little extra right touch on that valve to make sure that i got a really super good seal my buddy charlie says he's probably bringing that block over i wasn't really planning on doing a video on that 289 but since he's bringing it over here we might as well do a little video on the 289 i know i did a 289 build a long time ago but that was the early days of my youtube and the camera work was atrocious i cringe when i watched that video and there's still a lot of people that are watching it and liking it i'm just like why would anybody watch this it's terrible but anyway go watch the 289 video it's a great video one last thing i would recommend is that you lap the valves in and i'll do one here and show you how this works this is lapping compound it's made by loctite it is a bit of an abrasive compound so i just take a dab of this stuff and it has grit in it so you got to make sure that you get this out after you do this we're just going to take and put this on like three spots on the 45 degree angle here three or four spots and then we're going to very carefully put this into our seat there now they have a lapping sticks that have suction cups on them and i have one around here somewhere but i never use that i just grab the valve over here on this side and i start turning it like this and i put a couple fingers here and you can hear that abrasiveness when you start doing that it's pretty abrasive and you want to you want to do this back and forth don't spin the valve don't go all the way around you just want to go back and forth like this so we're going to go back and forth with that valve until you hear that abrasiveness in there smooth out that's it's going to get a lot smoother so what you're doing is you're bedding in that valve now you don't have to do this i just do it as an extra precaution because i want these to seat in even though they already would be seating in after grinding them it also tells you where your seats located it gives you a real good imprint on the face of the valve and shows you where that seat is located and once i get this lapped in i'll show you what i'm talking about all right so i've laughed that in for about a minute once you get that done you want to take the valve out now this lapping compound is gritty so we're going to re-wash these heads it have it's absolutely imperative that you re-wash the heads after you lap them even at this point always take and wipe as much of that compound out of there as you can uh and engines and cylinder heads are like a surgical operation man they got to be super clean so anyway we've got that lap now if we take a look at our valve you can literally see wipe the valve out you can see the imprint seat is so you can see how we got this shiny machined area up here and then you got that gray spot and that's a perfect width right there for uh the seat it's located really well it's pretty close to being in the center of that and the width is good so that is our seating area now it's important too once you lap these in you want to keep the valves in order so if i lap this valve and that seat i want that valve to go in that seat so after we lap them we're going to keep this in order then when we after we clean it up and finally assemble the head and set the springs up and stuff this valve will actually go in that seat where it was lapped to and and the rest of them will as well so i'm going to go ahead and get these left and then we'll clean these up in the jet wash and then i'll come back and we'll talk a little more about um assembling these heads set this first one up and i milled it on our milling machine here it was uh it was pretty flat but there was a few spots out here that had a little pitting and there's a few areas in the rock fire ring that just looked like didn't look good to me so i just went ahead and set it up and skim cut it and of course i'm going to have to melt both of them because you got to take the same amount out to keep the chamber the same size i only took about six thousandths off we'll get the other one set up and take six off of that too so another thing i did is you can see we got this headset up at kind of a weird angle now on the ends the threaded holes for the intake studs or bolts they come through on the intake side of the head and they they're drilled all the way through and tapped i had this broken bolt in here that was left in there so what i did is i set it up and i drilled it from this side with an eighth inch drill bit and then i took the bigger drill bit and i went in and i just drilled it i drilled the stud that was stuck in here out from this side and i used a smaller drill bit slightly smaller so i wouldn't damage those threads and once i got about i probably drilled about that much off of this because it was pretty long i tried to get it out from the top side what was sticking out before drilling it it would not budge so i drilled down through this side you can see where i went in with the drill bit and once i got about two-thirds of the way through that then i put vice grips on it again down here and worked it back and forth and it came out but you can see how that was rusted in there and that's why it snapped off when they took it so these bosses are not very thick here you got to be real careful when you drill broken bolts out of these my recommendation is you have a machine shop set it up and we leveled the heads so that the the bolt hole was exactly level with our our drill head that way we don't drill it crooked or have any issues with it you drill one of these crooked or get this off here you're gonna be in real trouble it could actually render the head unusable so just be careful with that when you got these broken bolts or studs in there nice and easy slow and easy is how you get those out now i'm gonna mill this one like i did that last one and then it's final wash and we're gonna get into the assembly of these things okay guys we're gonna take a look at our performance valve springs that we bought this is an engine pro valve spring and we want to check the opening and closing pressures the opening and closing pressures of the spring are critical for performance there's a couple things we need to check close pressure is how much pressure this spring exerts on the valve when it is closed so it's holding the valve closed against the seat and if we look at the specs on our springs here it'll tell us how much pressure we're supposed to have when the valve is closed and our valve when it is closed the spring is big is gonna be sitting at one inch seven hundred thousand that's the installed height of this spring so to duplicate that height we've set our dial calipers here for one inch seven hundred thousand and we're just gonna go in and we're just gonna come down until we just cut the calipers here so we're going to go down to we just touch it right there that's one inch 700 if you look at our dial here it says about 110 pounds the specs for this spring say 105 to 110 pounds at one inch 700 so we know that's a good spring now our lift on our cam is 480 so we need to compress that spring this is where it sits when the valve is closed so we know that the rocker is going to push this down 480 000. so to figure out what that is we got to do some math here so the spring is sitting at one inch seven hundred thousandths when it's installed with a valve closed now we're gonna minus 480 thousands from that and that tells us how far the rocker is going to push our spring one seven minus 480 is one inch 220 000 so we're going to set our caliper for one inch 220 thousandths because we want to make sure that we have the right pressure not only that we want to make sure that our springs are not going to coil bind what happens a lot of times if you put a bigger lift cam in if the springs can't handle the lift the spring collapses and all these coils bunch into each other and if they coil bind and become solid and then the cam tries to push that further in other words it has too much lift it'll break the spring and could possibly blow the engine so there's one inch 220 right there we're just gonna right there we just touched our calipers and if you see we've got plenty of space between our springs we kind of knew that was the case because we bought these springs to be compatible they're supposed to be good due to i50 lift we're only at 480 and also they're supposed to have around 280 uh pounds of pressure at 550 lift we're only at 480 and we got 270 so that's really good pressure for that cam that is a roller cam spring so so we know our spring's not going to coil bind we know the opening and closing pressures are correct we have a good spring or the correct spring for this head now the other thing is we got to check the heads and make sure that when these are on the head they're at one inch 700 i'll show you how to do that so this is our spring retainer here that we're going to use we're just going to go ahead we're going to put that on without the spring but before we do that we have this gauge this is called a spring installed height gauge and it reads just like a micrometer and our retainer just goes on top like that but what we do is we go ahead and we put this on the cylinder head first we just put it on there and then we're going to go ahead and put our retainer on and get our keepers on there we're just going to get our our keepers in here and basically that tool just takes the place of the valve spring so once we get our keepers in we just run this out and we take up that space between the retainer and the spring pad and that's literally where the spring is going to sit and then we just want to check our installed height so this this gauge now is reading point 1.765 sixty five we need to be at one point seven hundred so in order to get that in other words it's too tall so in order to get this height down to one point seven hundred one in seven hundred we have to shim this and that's why we're checking it because we want to make sure that this is at the right height so if it's too tall like this one is we have to take a shim we have shims in different thicknesses that we use we have a 30 000 shim here and we also have a 60 000 shim so we're at one in 765 so we need a 60 000 shim on there if we get one 700 plus or minus about ten thousandths we're good these are thirty thousand shims and on this valve we need 60 thousands so we're going to go ahead and use two of these now these shims on one side they'll say this side up and then they have this serrated edge on the bottom that's for heat transfer make sure the serrated edge goes down so since i need 60 here if i take and i measure two of these together right around 60 thousandths so that's what i need so i'm just going to go ahead and put two on and there's my shims now i'm going to go through i just did that as a demo but you have to check every one of them you have to make sure that your height is right on every one so that spring will sit at its specified height which in this case is one inch 700 so off camera i'll go ahead and get all these measured and shimmed and then we'll get these babies together okay guys so as you can see i've got everything shimmed we got our valve stem seals on and we're assembling the head one nice thing is we were able to use the original 289 retainers off of charlie's other heads and also we're gonna use his 289 rockers and i know those people out there i was like oh my gosh i can't believe you're not putting roller rockers on again budget build not a hot rod just want to upgrade better heads better flow get as much air in and out as we can and we are sticking with the stock rockers and retainers they're in good shape there's nothing wrong with them so once you get the shims on you get your valve stem seals on and make a mental note of the fact that we're using a positive type seal that clamps onto the guide on the intake and just an umbrella type seal on the exhaust the chevrolet valve has an o-ring groove on it which is a a bonus for us so we're going to go ahead and use the o-rings on these two so you're just going to take your spring and retainer and then we have our pneumatic spring compressor here and we are going to get on we are going to get on that spring and retainer compress the spring now before the keepers go on if you ever use these o-ring type seals the o-ring has to go on there first right so we're gonna we're gonna take that little black o-ring and we're going to put it over the valve like that and then we're going to get it down to the second groove it has to go down below into the second groove then i'm just going to put my keepers on the single groove keeper 11 30 seconds valve stem we get our keepers in there and just let our compressor out and of course we're going to repeat that for all the springs on both heads and we have assembled the head once you're done with this and you get all these on one critical step is that you need to take a soft hammer and smack the valve tips on all of these smack the tips don't use a steel hammer but we're just ensuring that the keepers are seated because if they're not they'll pop out and blow the motor we don't want that so always smack your valve tips with a soft hammer all right guys so thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed it and again um charlie's bringing over his 289 short block so who knows if i feel ambitious maybe we'll rip that thing apart and see what's wrong with it and then i definitely once we get the motor together i don't know if i'll walk you through the rebuild on the short block i mean we've done that so many times we'll probably shoot some video of it what i want to do is i want to get these set up on the engine and kind of show you how they how compatible they are and how the valve training stuff works with the gt40 heads so i will talk to you very soon i promise be sure to like this video and subscribe support me on patreon at myvintageiron7512. i really appreciate everything that all of you all the kind words and the comments and even some of the criticism sometimes just don't cuss me out because i'll just delete you so i will talk to you very soon i promise and we'll do it again

Channel: Myvintageiron7512

Views: 262,403

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Id: ckQJHVABRy0

Length: 51min 57sec (3117 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020