Speedmaster Small block porting tips and results Part 1

And yes I'm serious! What I see and what I hear is beginning and end pictures of what was done.. and talk of how and why. Which again is all great reading but I'm not sure I learned anything.. I mean any skill sets that is... It almost needs a video or pictures with arrows pointing out where to and how much to stuff like that...


If that's the case, you can buy the Smokey Yunick book, or the Jenkins book or a David Vizard book and those things are laid out pretty well in those.

If you like reading (and it sounds like you do) and if you can learn from reading (sounds like you can...some people can't read and learn as they are visual learners so you have to learn how you learn, not the way the cookie cutter, production line blow them out the door and get paid for it public education system way of learning) there a literally dozens and dozens of books worth reading.

One of them is the book by Harold Bettes. Can't think of the name of it, but I have it, have read it, many times and will read it again.

I have one of David Vizards books about porting and it has his ideas and experiences of what a port should look like.

There are many SAE papers and stuff out there in the public domain worth reading. I have about 7-8 full length SAE papers on two stroke porting. You can't place a value on that.

Don't forget about cross discipline leading either. For example, reading things about carburetor function benefits both carb and cylinder head knowledge. It goes both ways.


The NASA Technical Reseach Server web site has a HUMONGOUS amount of insane knowledge on it. Unreal what's there. Right now, I'm reading through NACA-TR-49 which was published 1919! Yep...1919 and it is incredible what these men built and tested back then. And you can pretty much say everything we can know about carburation was known before 1919! What a great resource that web site is.

Then you have nature. Want to know how air flows? Look to nature. It's simple really. An example is looking at fallen leave patterns. Where are the leaves and why? Why are there piles of leaves in one spot, and no leaves anywhere else?

The leaves stop where there is NO AIR FLOW. Where there is air flow, the leaves or long gone. Snow follows the same physical patterns. How does that relate to making horsepower? When I get a set of used heads in, the first thing I look at it the chamber burn patterns (one of my favorite things to do is look at the same pattern on the Pistons...and looking at the exhaust ports is fascinating all by itself) and from that you can see where you need to make improvements.

I can't tell you how many times I read (and it's still being published and it's STILL wrong) that any CLEAN area in the chamber or piston top is clean because of "fuel wash". So wrong. Where an area is carbon free, it's because there is ZERO air flow there. No air flow, no fuel in the air, no carbon from combustion.

The trick then is how do you get the full chamber full of air. Text books have been written about that.

If you like to fish (I hate fishing) you can learn a ton about how air ( which has fuel in it) behaves when it encounters obsticles. Watch water move around a rock. Look at water flowing at different speeds (higher or lower test pressures on a flow bench).

Look at how an air plane wing works. The air encountering an airplane wing behaves the same way in a port.

Lots of ways to learn and then apply it to your hobby.

He is a good one. How can an engine be dead rich but have an O2 reading that is normal and even have the spark plug pretty much agree with the O2 sensor?

An exhaust port cannot tell a lie. But an O2 sensor can.