- Alright. Hello I'm Davin Reckow with Hagerty, and in today's DIY we're gonna go through porting
a set of cylinder heads. (burr rubbling) Okay for porting this cylinder head a couple of fairly simple tools, but might not be in everybody's toolbox. So I have a set of
carbide double cut burrs. I have a good, happens
to be an Ingersoll Rand, but I have a good dye grinder, a long extended burr, flashlight, tool for the dye grinder, the intake valve and the exhaust valve. And then I also have some dye cam, some valve lapping compound and a lapping tool. An alternative tool to a dye grinder and a compressor and so and so forth would be a simple dremel tool, that would use a burr as well. The unfortunate part
about those dremel tools is the burrs will not be quite as large. So it will just take you longer, but you can still do the
function it's not a problem. So importing your cylinder heads there's two ways to look at things. The DIY standpoint, where I'm gonna gain 30, 40% of the flow in these heads over the stock versions, opposed to a hundred percent that I can get by taking them to a shop and dropping $2,500 or
more or slightly less. So the idea is for a little time, some fairly common tools, you can gain some good performance in a matter of few hours
in your own shop and be better than the guy with a stock setup. Okay so simple enough, an engine is an air pump. So air in and air out to make power. To do that you wanna smooth
the flow from the intake valve into the combustion chamber and then of course out of the exhaust. So simple areas to make improvements are in what they call
in the backside porting or the backside of the valve. So that'd be down in here. So camera wise you should be able to see there's a little ridge in here. These Pontiac heads aren't too bad, but in some of the heads
this is very pronounced. Regardless what we're gonna
do is we're gonna take a burr. This happens to be a
double carbide cutting burr come in here with a dye grinder and we're just gonna take that edge out and smooth things out. Now the other side is, is port matching what you would
do as on the intake runners, you'd take the gasket lay that over here, dye cam out and trace it. And then your gasket will typically be a slightly larger than the in the cast iron runner. And you basically open that up but you bring it back into the, in here so it's nice and smooth. Now on this Pontiac head, I am not going to do that because as you can see in
here that's very tight. As far as the push rod area, the push rod boss, and I don't want to cut
into that push rod boss and cause a vacuum leak inside the engine. So I'm just gonna stay away
from that side of things. Now caution you do not wanna get extremely aggressive on how
much material you remove, cause if you cut into the water
jackets, that's a problem. If you cut into the intake, flow from another side
that's also a problem. So be conservative in what you're cutting, unless you really know the
heads that you're working with, but you can gain a ton of
performance with just a little bit of massaging to them with the burr. Alright so my first step is I'm gonna take some
dye cam machinist dye. And am gonna coat the daylights
out of this whole chamber and the main reason is
so I can take the valve, put it inside with some lapping compound, and then I can clearly see where my seiling surfaces from my valves. And then as I use the grinder and that blue is worn away or cut away, I can easily see where I'm at because I do not want my burr
to hit this seiling surface. So a little dye cam. And if you've never used this before, it has a nice smell to it and it dries up it dries the touch quickly. And if you need to wipe
it off, it wipes off with some brake clean or you can just leave it. All right so I'm gonna
take my intake valve, put a little grinding compound on it and I wouldn't need to
coat all the way round, but we'll make sure we cover it. And all this is going to do is it's gonna take some
of that blue back off so we can clearly see where
the seiling surfaces at. (valve lapping) and wonder if you're doing this a lot, this is what they would
call lapping in a valve if you do it much longer. All right so now the valve out you can see that the silver band here, this is where the valve
seals into the seat. So it was, I come in here with this cutter i gotta fair amount of leeway
even down in this bottom edge, to clean out this edge of
the casting to the seat, I'm just gonna smooth out to it. I'm probably gonna leave just a little bit of a hole right there. Cause I don't wanna get
too far up in here and get, I don't need to get that excited about it. So for instance, as we get
cutting this lip right here, I'm gonna pull this out and come back. And on the exhaust side, you can see there's a
huge ridge right here, which will adversely affect the flow as that combustion chamber empties. So I'm gonna start by using this Christmas tree shaped cutting burr. And I find that I can do most of the work that I'm after with that but, I like to regulate my speed. You can also regulate your air
pressure right at the wall. (burr rubbling) So you can see it's already starting to take shape pretty quickly. This does do damage awful fast so you have to be careful. You notice I'm moving it nice and easy. I'm not putting a bunch of pressure on it, let the tool do the work and just keep floating
across that surface. And all I'm trying to do is
smooth this out so it's a nice, a nice shape, smooth think of the airflow coming from this side, flowing through, just eliminating all the ridges. (burr rubbling) So I think with that
camera angle you can see now that is a straight shot through up until the cylinder. It doesn't have a hump to move around. It's fairly smooth just with the carbide. You can come in and
polish it a little bit. I wouldn't go more than
36 grit though with on the intake side and basically I'll need to
go around the whole thing do the short side a little bit as well. And this port will clean up pretty nice. (burr rubbling) Now this port is
definitely a lot smoother. There's a better transition
coming from the intake side into the port chamber. It could use a little bit more sanding. I'll need to take a little bit
of a sander and go in there, but even with the cutting burr it's very smooth
comparatively to the as cast of course now I need to go
through and do the other seven. All right so now the only difference between the intake and the exhaust is purely intake versus exhaust. So your flow instead of
coming from the carburetors and flowing over the backside of the valve and into the chamber now you're going from the chamber out. So just keep that in mind
as you look at the port and you're cleaning it up to take ridges out going this way. So for instance looking at this port you at the top of the guide
there's a ridge there. I'm gonna just gently come in and take that off and smooth it up. And then as you look at it
there's a big ridge right here we're gonna work that back
and try to even it out. Because air will flow
over a rounded surface or slightly rounded surface way better than a sharp edge. It's just more consistent. (burr rubbling). Okay so from this side I have
things fairly roughed in. I'm gonna have to change my
burr to get this real well. I need something probably a little more surely I'd probably use this
and just glaze that edge to blend it in. And then to get on the top
of this backside radius, I can get some from the, some of it from the
bottom or the backside but I think I can take this in here being mindful that this
is gonna seal up here. So I don't wanna run even
the flat edge of the burr the shaft of the burr up on there but I need to come in here and tip it up and bring it about like that. And just break that edge that's up there. Now something to note as the length of the shaft
increases on the burr, you wanna to reduce the speed because the faster this slings, this weight out here, it'll start acting like
a piece of spaghetti, which is uncontrollable. So you wanna run this a lot slower, so you don't have that bounce and chatter and just flat out can't control it. (burr rubbling) Something else to note with carbide burrs, you will quickly separate the good from the crappy, dye grinders because I found that
some of the dye grinders, the very least expensive ones will, are not balanced. And they're actually
not very smooth either. So when you start getting a
lot of chatter on a short bit, it's probably because your grinder is not well balanced or a very well-made one. This is where a few extra
dollars on the grinder is by far well worth it. So the difference between a $10 one and this is only about a
60 or $70 one is huge. Both in how you can control the speed and the fact that it's not
doing this all the time, will make your job a whole lot better. (burr rubbling) Patience is certainly
going to be a virtue here at the end of the day you'll probably have about an hour minimum just in one chamber. So yes, that's about eight hours but it's also your time opposed to paying somebody else's time and you can gain some good performance, not all of it, but good performance. (burr rubbling) And obviously I'm checking, just reaching in and
feeling with my finger, feeling that transition, you know like right now
with the sanding roll, I got this nice and smooth, but there's still like a
little ridge back here, which I'll have to get
with a little deeper burr. And this is still pretty rough, but I'll have to change
to a smaller sanding roll to get in this little
bit of a dish right here, I'm working on a Pontiac head. There are multiple Pontiac heads, all different chamber styles,
different intake runners. And then you get into a Chevy
on a Ford and a Chrysler so on and so forth. They're all gonna be slightly different. So I can't sit and tell
you that this is gonna, this exactly is how you
do it on every other head. You're gonna have to use
your own common sense and look at things and feel how it flows, know how that chamber looks, know what you're getting into as far as, you know like a bolt hole and
making sure you don't get in, you know cut too much material. But again if you stay conservative, just take the casting edges off will still be an improvement
over what you had. Okay so other than just cleaning up the backside of the ports, as I mentioned before you can go through and you can open a port match, the exhaust you can port
match the intake side. One of the other two areas
I like to work on as well is the aesthetic performance. So from an aesthetic standpoint, if I come in and I shaved
the casting lines down, it gives me a better surface
for the paint to adhere cause paint doesn't want
to stay on a knife edge. So performance wise aesthetically the paint will stay on here. It'll look nicer it'll look nicer longer. Secondly, on these
Pontiac head specifically in the intake, in the rocker valley, this had a lot of casting flash. So I took the opportunity with the grinder since I had them off and completely bare went through and I shaved
all the casting flash off. Now, does that improve power? No, but what it will do is
it'll avoid any loose casting from falling into the engine and going through your bearings and your pump and causing
all kinds of ugly. Secondly, it will help relative to depending on where it's at, it'll help oil drain back, and it's better to have oil
out of the top of the head and into the oil pan where the oil pump can pick
it up and put it right back, but it drains back quicker and overall your engine
will be a lot happier. Thanks for watching. Hopefully you got some information out of porting some cylinder heads. By the way this particular
head is gonna be on our red line rebuild of a Pontiac engine. You might wanna subscribe
and if my editor doing right over here, then there should be something right here to click on, subscribe,
leave your comments and until then have fun. (laughing). - [Narrator] Seriously like
we gotta have fun(mumbles) - Yeah.
