X-Head Porting....
The first......”porting”.......I did was on some 906 heads.
I had no idea about what I was doing .......at all.
This was in the mid-80’s.
I used an air grinder powered by a 1hp craftsman compressor.
Yeh......... the grinder speed wasn’t very fast.
And I was using “stones”.
I barely even scratched the surface on those heads....... I don’t think I hurt them any, but in hindsight....... what I did was a waste of time(other than to get my feet wet with doing that type of work).
LOL...sounds like how I got my start. Funny thing is, I quickly realized that porting is like racing. If you race long enough you WILL break parts, you WILL crash and you WILL spend money. The statistics say that all will happen.
If you want to port heads, you WILL make mistakes, you WILL put holes in heads and intakes and there ain’t a thing you can do about that, unless you are some guru who gets a pallet of castings to work with and you can cut up the heads and see that water and such and you WILL spend money.
That’s the way it works. I know a guy who is much better at porting than I am, but he was so afraid of putting a hole in something he compromised too much. And if he did put a hole in something, it was literally DAYS of depression, self doubt and mentally beating himself into the ground to the point he would want to quit doing it.
I was driving truck in 1997, because the boss we had decided I was a bad employee and fired my *** so I had to work. And I needed my new tunnel ram ported. So I asked him to do it as I was too busy. He called me several days later fully depressed because he put a hole in the manifold. It wasn’t big, so I filled it it, added some weld in the rest of the places where he would blow a hole in it and it was no big deal.
But for him, it was like he trashed the intake. Some guys never get around that thinking and it makes them not as effective doing port work.