Take a look at this. Now, me and my buddies used to joke about ricers or idiots in general trying to take material off their heads by sanding them on a piece of glass, but it turns out this is a legitimate technique for resurfacing. It is apparently how some shops back in the day used to resurface warped heads, which makes sense.

I know it is not as simple as this, seeing as you have the problem of changing the overall height of the cylinder head therefore making other problems like improper mating of the manifold, valve clearances and changed CR and what not (which can easily be solved by using a custom thickness aftermarket gasket), but it seems like a good way of doing it on the cheap. Plus you can get to the required surface RMS (roughness) by just moving up in sandpaper grit.

I may look like the biggest idiot/cheapass on this forum but IMO it's a pretty cool concept.

 

Well, goes to show 911 owners are strange people ! You could see on that video how the head was tilting forward as he pushed the head, so it isn't going to be flat...

 

tilt, schmilt. Just put on some RTV and crank it down. You'll be fine.

 

While the end result MAY be reasonably "flat" it would no longer be true as one end invariably will get sanded down more than the other due to weight, hand pressure etc. . Will it work ? probably.... is it right ? NOPE.
Reminds me of hearing about Kiwi mechanics rebuilding pistons by recutting enlarging the ring grooves for new rings and expanding the skirts using a sandbag and a press simply because replacement parts were hard to get and "expensive".
Plus what you can get away with on a flathead engine as far as milling the heads is quite different with OHV or Overhead cams

 

Jim, seen the movie "the fastest Indian"? When you live on a small island at the bottom of the Pacific (next stop Antarctica) then sometimes needs must. The same place where bungey jumping was invented, the Hamilton jet was invented, the birthplace of Rutherford (as in Rutherford Bohr) and where a farmer made cylinders out if cans, built his own engine and airframe and according to witnesses flew before the kitty hawk event. Pretty neat place really. :-)

 

Or you could drop it off at the machine shop......

 

LOL! I used to do this with small cylinder heads of mopeds with small 50cc 2-stroke engines! I was 16 at that time... Quite common for a teenager;-)

 

^+1 - right on up to 500cc singles.

 

Same here, only we took a mirror. Very tiring though.

 

Yup, BTDT in my early years as a gearhead. Works well on 2 stroke heads.

NZ is also the birthplace of the Britten. An amazing machine that beat the factory racing tems in their own game and it, engine and all, was made in a double car garage.

 

Yes since two strokes ARE flat heads !! And I have a lot of respect for the New Zealand spirit of making things work. Never really having their own automakers they ended up with an odd assortment from all over the world (now overun with Japanese cars that were retired and exported ). You also see some weird engine swaps being done perhaps for the same reasons.