Ok my story in short is something like this,425 nailhead with 1/8 stroker sbc h beam rods ross custom pistons at 0 deck.This is where i stand completed machine work and ballanced. Now to port the heads,i have done a few sets in my day but never on a nailhead.So to start i sacrificed one head to see where water is found on my kwickway seat machine.When i opened the bowls up,not much there at all.Agwa and how,so my question here is are there better castings or more desirable ones to port. My heads were (rip) 66 or 65 castings #b1196914j .Is this the best buick has to offer ? Winter is comming and now is when i should start eating iron .Thanks for any info,Gary
Nope, and that's pretty why you stay away from hardened seats, you'll hit water when cutting for them. Well that and the high nickel content combined with relatively low spring pressure pretty much means there is no need. There's not a lot of meat to open them up. Sorry you ruined the heads to find out, a simple question first would have saved a set of heads and some time. Maybe you can find a picture of some that Gessler has done to get an idea of what can be done, but by no means expect big numbers, they just aren't there for the.
Ed,if i build it it will beat you nomatter what it is.Give me a reason.........I DARE YOU!!! BWAAAAAHAHAHAHA
Guess one of us will findout the hardway won't we. Iwill call that guy in conn with those engines and see if he has any heads for you if you need some. But you probably have back ups already
Pontiac rods will be a whole lot easier to use I'm pretty sure you only have to thin down the big end. Russ Martin used Pontiac rods in his roadster maybe you can get a hold of him and see what he has to say. He knows his shit!! I have never ported a set of heads but last night I was going Thur some treads over on V8Buick.com about porting you should check it out. There are some pic on one of the treads that show a nicey done set of heads also has some flow #'s on them
Gary, Joe Mondello did my Nailhead, fact is it's shown on this page on his website: http://www.mondello.com/pages/services_engine.htm He ported mine and made hardened valve seats for them too. He knows the tricks to make a Nailhead work. Call Joe !
Funny you should say but i know joe and had asked him his thoughts on the beloved nail head.Good luck with the exhaust was his advice. I spent a week with him at his school when he was in paso robles and learned a bunch.I still speak to him from time to time,personally or through others. Joe would be the first one to tell you if you want to see some changes you have to push it a little,sometimes you have to go too far to see how far you can go.Now i know to go .250 down instead of .375 on the intake bore at 85 percent of the valve diameter.
Gessler head porting will be the ones to ask. He's current on Nailheads and what can be done to them. Bigger valves is one of the things he told me. I've got a Nailhead and will be sending him my heads. The other thing he said is that despite the handicap of the exhaust, he focuses a lot on the intake. "The more you put into the cylinder, the more power it's going to make." That'd be one example of Gessler over Mondello, I s'pose. I'm curious--do you have a stroker crank in yours, or just longer rods? -Brad
I like what he does to the manifolds... I used to have some pics of a set of heads he ported and can't find them. And google was no help. Sounds like he has a stoker and didn't just go after rod/stroke ratio. Like was said Russ used a Pontiac rod in his roadster, but I believe it was for ratio and not stroking it. All in all a Nailhead is never going to have big flow numbers and Gessler knows this, he focuses on maintaining velocity as well as a pretty damn good increase for the Nailhead. But there is a wall, and to get past that wall you would end up changing the Nailhead to where it's no longer a Nailhead. It's liek when Edelbrock was talking about making Nailhead stuff, one of the things they asked was if they made different heads that the stock manifolds didn't bolt up to would anyone be interested. In my opinion at that point just get a SBC.
Brad,I used a set of eagle 6.200 i beam rods.they were .012 shorter than my stock nailhead rods and lighter to boot.The crank was offset ground for a additional .125 stroke when it was turned to the small block rod diameter. I was going to a forged piston regardless so to move the wrist pin .068 and fit it to a .927 was no big deal.My reasoning was components needed and additional costs were custom pistons at 800 and a few extra bucks at my crank grinder.Pistons were lighter so a drill job was all that was needed.Now yeilding 451 ci,free hosepower the way i see it.If you would like i have a extra crank if anyone wishes to do the same,pm me .
Today i decided to play with my failed head and do some cutaway exploring with my drop saw.I was more suprised that the wives tales about nailheads unable to get hardend seats is absolutly TRUE.There are some real scary spots to be aware of even if you are doing a simple valve job. One shot shows a ported intake i had started and cut in half.Another shows the exhaust seat so close to the chamber in the front of the head that too much of a top cut your into water.You can plainly see where i tried to hog the bowls and broke through,this port is almost totally shrouded on one side and has to adressed with extreame care. If your attempting ANY machine work at all you better be on your game. There is another shot of a intake i unschrouded and did a valve job on.This i think is the direction i am heading with a poirt shape like the one i chopped. Look closely at the amount of material between the seat and water jacket,imo i cannot see putting a seat that shallow and narrow that would be worth a dam. I hope my failure can help someone else as well,the way i see it everything is a learning experiance,good or bad. Off to e-town to find another set of donors tommorow.
Here's a pix of my car in 1960, after this pix I installed 2 AFB's and unshrouded the valves with a hand grinder and blew out 2 chambers, quit a bit of hot water came out. After carefully doing another set of heads it ran 112 around 13.0 with Dynaflow & 3.54 gears. Where has all the time gone? Pat
I can't find the magazine article but Max Balchowski made aluminum heads for his "Old Yeller" road race cars. I'd thro away my 460 stuff if I could find the patterns to cast more.
Great information on the heads! After seeing how close the water jackets are and how hard it would be to get a whole lot more flow out of them - thank gosh I've never taken my porting tools to a set - would have gone through for sure I'm about to undertake the porting of a Cadillac flathead block - now that should be some fun
Gary thanks for the pics, I've tried to tell people for years that the water is close, now I can just show them your pics.
ZMAN ,I thought of your heeds as i was cutting beleive me and how.Picture no 1 was the most suprising of all,The exhaust seat was almost into water and these heads only had one rebuild on them and they were not ground deep at all.Dancing on eggshells i will with the grinder for shure.
I hate that another head got ruined, but at least we got to learn from this one. It is a precarious head that's for sure...
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