[s-cars] What to do while the head is off?

[CaptMagu at aol.com]

Tom

While the head is out you might want to port match the IM and EM, add the RS2
exhaust cam with Bilstein lifters, debated at great length would be
porting/extrude honing of the head with particular care to the area around
the valves and extrude honing of the manifolds, steel head gasket, and last
but not least a head studding kit and manifold fasteners from ARP Raceware. I
have done all the above but like a lot of things involved in the "Black Art"
of automotive tuning its real hard to put a qualatative figure as to how much
this or that mod did to improve performance. The biggest detriment to the
analysis of individual performance gains would be the cost factor in doing
individual mods. We end up doing group mods. In my case, the stock head with
no mods was lifted off the block and the head bolts stretched from the flow
out of the big Garrett turbo I run. This necessitated the head being pulled
and the since we've got the head off anyway argument lead to all these mods
being done at once. The only thing I left out was the annealing process the
machine shop put the head through to strengthen it. Sorry this is so long but
I thought you might be interested in another listers thought process. You can
certainly do parts of the whole but, "since we've got the head off anyway".
HTH and good luck.

Hap, clearing his head out in Evergreen, Maguire