Lonnie, here's what I used for the port work. The long die grinder isn't necessary for reach, but I find I have more control with it because I can hold it with both hands. I use my index finger on the trigger to control the speed and my middle finger under it as a stop. That leaves my left hand to hold the shank, and I rest my elbow on something to steady myself. The carbide burrs are much faster than the sandpaper rolls at removing material, but very easy to take too much too. I like the one laying down because it doesn't have any sharp edges, and with the curve on the back side I can reach around curves in a port. The other one I used is second from the right, back row, a kinda fat, slightly rounded, cone shape. The straight taper works well in a straight port and the radius was a close match to the gasket opening. I used the sandpaper rolls for smoothing things out after the carbide burrs. The burrs I have aren't for aluminum and tend to plug up. They work ok as long as I keep the rpm down and give them a squirt of wd40 once in a while. Coarser ones for non ferrous metals are available, but I don't think I trust myself with something that aggressive, these ones will make a mess fast enough for me. Whoever started the saying "cuts like a hot knife through butter" obviously never tried using a sharp carbide burr in a good die grinder. It's a good idea to practice on a scrap head the first time. I hit a water jacket the first time I was working on ports and turned a perfectly good 460 head into scrap. At least it was just a smogger one, nothing rare.
This is the first time I've used this style of spring compressor, and I like it. Once you get the keepers in place, you can lift the spring up against it to keep it in place as you remove the compressor. I didn't have a single one pop out doing it this way.
Heads assembled.
Shiny new gaskets. This time the right ones even. Front wheel drive applications have coolant passages at both ends instead of just at the back for rwd ones. The previous engine still has the original head gaskets, at least I've never pulled the heads.
Heads torqued and ready. I lined up the intake manifold gaskets with the ports in the heads, then put some contact cement on the intake and bolted it on. That's how I made sure the ports are lined up between the intake, gaskets, and heads.
Got to love egg cartons for organizing parts. But seeing how I had the heads and valves machined, there wasn't much point to keeping everything sorted out. When I took it apart I wasn't planning on having any machine work done.
I soda blasted the intake, couldn't bolt that dirty old thing back on the way it was, as well as the rockers and fulcrums. I screwed around with a piece of hose and an air gun like I'd read on the net a bit, but that didn't work very well, so I dumped some baking soda into my siphon feed paint gun and tried that with the fan pattern airflow shut off. Then I had results. Soda blasting is supposed to be delicate enough for carbuerator cleaning, so I'm pretty sure my paint gun will be fine. It cleaned the gunk off pretty good once I got the worst of the oil off with lacquer thinner, but was gentle enough I could hold the rockers with my bare hands and it didn't hurt at all. The mess was something else, definitely and outside job. I almost warranted a selfie, I looked like I'd been rolled in flour and was ready for a hot frying pan. Turns out breathing baking soda stings the sinuses a bit too, so a dust mask would have been a good idea.
I have to pull the rockers and pushrods back off though and see if the lifters are fully collapsed or not. Hopefully they're stuck partway, because the valve are all open a little bit when they're not supposed to be. There's supposed to be between 2.15 - 4.69mm of clearance when the lifters are fully collapsed and on the base circle, so unless the guy really screwed up the valve job, I should be ok. Scared me when I tightened the rockers down though, and all the valves came off the seats. That's all for now, hopefully tomorrow I can get the rockers figured out, then I can bolt on a pan and oil pump, then a dummy distributor, and spin the pump to make sure I have oil where I should. I forgot about that step when I dropped the distributor in today.
Kristian
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