Carl - can you explain exactly how you would clean an assembled head?

 

I will show everyone here what it looks like when someone has a fundamental mechanical misunderstanding with these heads. To be clear, this has nothing to do with carl, but... yeah, its related to our "928 family"



Yes - these are bronze flakes from someone raping a valve guide WITH the valve stem and then continuing assembly




"Assembled heads" can arrive in plastic bags "ready to install" and still look like this:



I think everyone should look very carefully at this picture. We need to be more careful, and ask more from our "vendors":


Pieces of a destroyed valve seal. What was the valve seal destroyed? Because the valve guide was hammered in with thor's hammer after a night out on the town. The guides were ballooned to the point of not accepting the valve seals themselves.




The light at the end of the tunnel? No, its Bronze shavings from not reaming the guides properly and just shoving in the valve to the point of using the valve AS the reamer.



But again, This is not Carl's or his "vendors" work. But Its a warning, as this was another one of our "928 family's" work, and it cost me 1800 for the first time (this) and 3000 to have it fixed.

 

 

Well when i spoke to Carl he said oh, i will mention in the valve jobs next time for the new customer so go and clean your heads? WTF. i am not a machinist and i rely on people that said this is their field of expertise...I paid for a complete job that was supposed to be ready to bolt on the block, but Martin and i saw the heads were not hot tank and cleaned as they should be. We saw assembly lube in all the spots and when spoke to Gretchen she stated the heads are fully assembled and ready for a bolt on from the packages, plus a one year warranty- I hope this is true and nothing happens...Thank God we had all other parts and decided to check the oil check valves,spring,ball and the seats. We did not pull the two end plug yet.

 

 

A friend that was building a high performance Chevy engine once bought some heads from a well known, big supplier of performance engines, and parts. These were freshly machined, high performance heads, that had all brand new components, including larger valves, better springs, stronger retainers, etc., and were supposed to be all ready to bolt on right out of the box. That's what he did.

After we completed assembling and installing the engine, it started right up, but smoked a fair amount. More than you'd see from something like the rings not being seated yet, and it didn't get any better.

It turns out that the supplier that he bought the heads from did assemble them, but they did it without putting any valve seals in. None. Zero out of sixteen.

Any time that I have head work done on an engine, I do not have the shop doing the machining assemble them. After I get everything back, I thoroughly inspect everything, clean anything that might need it, and do the assembling myself. Doing it that way is the only way that you'll know it's done the way that you want. If you can't do it yourself, you'll just have to hope you get lucky.

 

So I take it that when they say clean with great car I use brake clean and a q tip and then compressed air? The ball seat is made out of metal or rubber. It doesn't state there

 

Ball seat is metal

 

IIRR there are 5 plugs in each 4 valve head. They all need to be drilled out, all holes cleaned and new plugs installed. Very very few people do this. Most rely on external cleaning by pumping brake cleaner into all oil feeds and blowing stuff out with compressed air.

 

the trick with the ball seat is to get a piece of metal and hook the ball seat to see if its moving in its bore,
if so try to remove the seat if not and its just loose then spray some brake cleaner on the seat then blow it out then add a few drops of Green loctite then stake the top edges into place

 

Carl,

Slapping on a tag bacasue you are not willing to do a proper job is not a solution! Farming out a job still makes you responsible for the final product and if the shop you are dealing with is not good enough for this, stop representing them.

The smartest thing would be to post the shops info, and have future customers deal with them directly. This removes you as a middleman and the removes the resposibility of answering for their screw ups.

 

This is a good thread if only to raise awareness of the issue.

Even if the shop cleans and bags them, the installer STILL must do a final cleaning and inspection just before assembly. BC's post #32 shows why.

Also: go to this page: http://www.928motorsports.com/install.php and download "Engine Pre-Assembly" from the Engine Products section. The article shows engine and crank cleaning of a "clean, tanked" block and crankshaft. Its amazing how much metal you can get out of crankshaft oil galleys!

Thank you for your post BC, those are good pics.

 

you can see how they will move in this picture, it wore through the cup even though the set screw was tight.

 

Yes, but Carl, how would you clean an assembled head?

 

Let me ask this question. I took my head to a shop to have them leveled or whatever you call it. They didn't do any valve work and I have looked in the head top and for good measure blasted them with a can of brake clean each (not spraying lifters). I got a few tiny shavings out but really not hardly anything.

Should I pull the lifters out and blast each with another can of brake clean? Can I damage any seals by doing this? Again, I didn't have any valve work done, just had them planed. They pulled the lifters out when they did the planing.