[Shaolin Crane]

Are you going to smooth out the welded spots?

[94cobra69ss396]

If you mean on the inside of the port then yes. If you mean on the outside then no. I still have some more work to do on all the ports and I should be able to work on it this weekend. I also got everything to put it back together and I have 2 weeks of vacation starting next week so I should have it running next week.

[Shaolin Crane]

Yes, inside of the port.

[94cobra69ss396]

I've been working on the intake and heads the past few days and have the intake done and the heads mostly done. I took a couple of the ports I had fixed on the intake but don't have time to upload them today because I have two basketball games tonight. I'll try to take some tomorrow if I can and post them. With shopping for Christmas still to do I probably won't be able to get back to them until after Christmas but we'll see how that goes.

[94cobra69ss396]

I didn't have time to work on the heads today because I had to find a vibration in the front of the Explorer that I got after going wheeling a week ago. I ended up having to replace the passenger side axle U-joint and the drivers side hub assembly. I did take some pictures of the finished intake manifold and a few of the heads.

Here are the few pictures I took of the two ports I had fixed as I was cleaning them up.










Here are the finished ports.

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Here's a couple of the cylinder heads.

Exhaust






Intake

[Shaolin Crane]

Work looks great, too bad you didn't do that before the valve job though.

[94cobra69ss396]

Why's that? I didn't touch the guides at all and I'm going to lap them after I clean all the carbon off them.

[Shaolin Crane]

Originally Posted by 94cobra69ss396

Why's that? I didn't touch the guides at all and I'm going to lap them after I clean all the carbon off them.

I know, but you could have gone all out, hit the pockets, seat rims, everything.

[94cobra69ss396]

I finished porting the heads and then cleaned and lapped the valves. After that I cleaned the heads and intake manifold, installed the new valve seals and then assembled the heads. I had a couple of valves that were pitted on the seat and I wasn't sure if they were going to leak so I tested each port after I assembled them. I ended up with one intake and one exhaust that seeped. I lapped those two valves again and was able to get the intake to seal but the exhaust was still seeping so I ordered a new valve. It came in a few days ago and it is now seals.

I started installing the headers onto the heads because it's easier to install the heads with them on than it is to try and install them after but when I went to tighten the header bolts on the driver side head I pulled the threads on three holes. Now I need to drill, tap and install helicoils on it. I did get the passenger side head on and torqued down and tonight I will fix the other head so that tomorrow I can try and have it back together and running.

[Shaolin Crane]

There's a reason why the big dollar race heads are completely helicoiled.