gbrettin

The heads... Wow. Anything to do with the plenum has been a Greek Tragedy. If you recall, sometime last year I stripped 5 of 10 bolts in the head. The plenum is a floppy donkey and hard to align on the head which caused me to strip the head.

Rusty had a great idea of to drill out the holes and insert steel inserts. I've decided to take it one step further and put studs in as well. This will never happen again and the studs will help tremendously putting on the plenum.

The process has of getting the inserts in has been somewhat of a shi1t show. The holes had to be walked up bit sizes one at a time until I hit the final size specified for the threaded insert. After that, I tapped the hole and then put the insert in with some extra red loctite.

This whole process is a butt clincher. Don't think that I wasn't nerved up doing this. The heads have been decked and also have seat work for the valves. The intake side has oversized valves to boot.

The tap that came with the kit, 60 dollar kit..., broke off in the head due to a bad casting. That was worked out of the head and a bit of time. There is only one hole left that has a bolt broke off in it with a broken bit. I called in my machinist buddy to get that one out. I drew my line.

One head is done and on. Head studs have been torqued down. I'm hoping to have the other head on real soon.