I've been working on a set of 305 HO heads for a while now. I don't have a lot of time, so I end up working on them for 2 or three hours at the most, once or twice a week. So far I have not finished the first head. I have gasket matched the intake ports, got rid of all the carbon deposits in the exhaust side, narrowed down the valve guides. I've also blended in the bowls, removed any bumps/ dimples in the intake ports, and smoothened out the short side radius. What has the taken the most time is working on the valve guides. As this is my first port/ polish job, I've been reading as much as I can on the subject. I've been especially following Sitting Bull's old 305 port and polish article.

I was able to get my hands on a digital camera today, and I was able to grab a few shots in bad lighting before the batteries died. I'll try to post some more better pictures when I get a chance. Basically, I want to hear comments or advice in regards to my work so far. I haven't cleaned all of the grinding residue(whatever you want to call it) because I took these right after I finished working on them this afternoon.

Here are the pics I have for the moment. This is one of the valve guides on the intake side.

 

Dam, that looked really bad. I made it smalle, so hopefully it looks better now...

 

blue just kinda curious what kinda numbers do you run with that car?

 

Heres another valve guide on the intake side as well. ..

 

Honestly, I do not know what I run right now. It has been detonating for months, the timing jumps around +/- 3 or 4 degrees, it runs rich at some points, and lean at others. I am not even going to try to fix anything. The 305 is coming out, and I am dropping in a tuned port 350. Hopefully I'll be running low 13s with my head work and a moderate cam.

Here is another valve guide. This one is on the exhaust side...I haven't finished with it yet.

 

Here is a pic of the intake port. The valve guide is really hard to see here, but it is towards the top of the pic inside the red circle.

 

Heres the last pic I have. This is the exhaust port. I have not polished it yet, just smoothened out the short side radius, took out all of the ridges and casting flash, and started trimming the valve guide.

Apologize for the crappy looking pics, but these are all I can get for the moment. I'll try to post some better ones.

 

If you wouldn't mind editing that first post to eliminate that large and blurry pic, that'd be nice.

You said you cleaned up all the carbon deposits - didn't you have these tanked before you started? Makes life a lot easier, and you're more likely to find an existing crack that would make all that work worthless.

The way I approached it was to do everything to one cylinder on a practice head. Then, I did each operation to all 8 cylinders before moving on to the next step. You're more likely to get consistent results that way, short of flow checking each port and cc'ing each chamber.

These are going on a 350? Are you putting in 1.94" intake valves? Might want to be generous with unshrouding as well (use a head gasket to know what not to exceed). Doing the cc'ing would be a good idea in that case. Use a thick composition gasket if chamber volume is low and piston tops are flat.

 

It's been a little while since I've done any porting(maybe 8 months) but I like to use templates since I'm lazy. Here's what I used to match some 14014416 castings (and installed 1.94" valves - for a 350):



If you scale the drawing correctly to match the 6" scale, you can print the result, cut it out, and make cars stock or plastic templates to check your work.

Mine ended up like this:

 

I know I should be running a bigger intake valve, but I had a very small budget to work with, and I am at it already. I'm gonna stay with the 1.84 intake for the moment. I was originally planning on hot tanking the heads after I finished them. It would clean off any pieces of metal I may have missed while I was cleaning them. I also plan to cc the heads after I polish the combustion chamber. That should let me know where my compression is going to be at. Should I open up the chamber a little using the head gasket as a template? I am sure compression will be way too high with the pistons that are in my short block (9.6 with 64 cc heads), so I was probably going to need a set of dished pistons.

I had started working on one thing at a time at first, but I got too eager to try different parts of the head.

Vader, thanks for the templates. I'll print them out and see how they compare to mine.

 

92blue next time i see you ill bring my camera and we can get some nicer pictures so people can actually see all the hard work you have done!

i swear hes spent like 20 hours on just one head... even did some here at my house! its hard work porting that iron it seems.

can those heads flow more than 230CFM when they are ported?

 

F-Bird '88 has gotten them above that but he really ported them!

 

The intake ports could be matched better to the gasket. The gasket match should look more like this.

 

Been extremely busy with school and work (and a computer virus) as of lately. Finally got a chance to get some more pics. These aren't as good a quality as I wish they were, but they are better than the previous pics. Hopefully these can be useful.

Heres one intake valve guide.

 

Heres an exhaust port

 

Heres another view...

 

Heres another exhaust port...

 

I don't think these pics are clear enough to be of much use still. KingTal0n, we need to get together sometime this week to take some pics with your camera. Hope you still have your dial caliper, I've been losing sleep with my .022 over pistons....