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Basic Cylinder Head Porting

That article suggests using stones for the port entries. Be very careful of doing that. Rocks will come apart with little or no warning. In the 30+ years I have been porting heads I have never used a rock.
 
good article!
i always wondered though, without having some kind of thickness checker (UT?), what's the risk of grinding thru to the water jacket?
that would really ruin a persons day :doh
 
Depends on the cylinder head. Most small block Ford heads have a decent amount of material in the walls and you don't need to remove a lot of material in order to make them flow well. In fact, the majority of the work on SBF heads is in the valve bowls. The really thin areas are the floors and you NEVER touch the floor of a Ford cylinder head.

The iron big block heads are notorious for having thin areas in the intake runners. One head can be .380" thick in one spot and another can be less than .100" in the same spot. It's really a crap shoot unless you have a sonic tester.
 
I took quite a bit of material out of my exhaust ports. That alone made a huge difference. If you stand them side by side with an un-port matched pair of heads, it's hard to imagine how a stock engine is supposed to breathe through those tiny exhaust ports.
 
I hogged out a ton of material from my 66 289 exhaust ports.

Before:
head_porting.jpg


After:
head_porting2.jpg


Messy work but other than time and a few tools a pretty easy and cheap performance upgrade. With a decent cam and free flowing exhaust 300Hp is pretty atainable out of a 289-302 with iron heads.
 
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