SM Head Modifications on a budget

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Where the yellow is, it would help to lay this back to the gasket line, and concave the chamber wall from the deck to the seat top. I also don't do my seat cuts that way, but making more room for the valve will help...it will also speed up the air so that will make the pinch and ST more critical. But I've seen 280 cfm from a very mildly touched ST, large pinch, 89.5% throat, 75/60/45/38 seat cut with a back cut on the valve. No guide boss slimming, very little head bolt bulge work, but good chamber work and proper blending of the valve job especially on the ST side. You have to not just eliminate the 75 cut, but work it in a way that makes it more of a radius into the 60. The rest of the circumference I leave a small partial amount of the 75 cut and underneath it needs to be smooth. If you lay back the top of the ST some and blend it you'll hit 280cfm. If you want to show people how to get good ports, you need to start with the WHY...in this case it's about unlocking the short comings of the port to make it more homogeneous top to bottom. Opening the pinch with all this other work done, will slow the air down and allow it to better navigate the ST. But it needs to be worked really well...roof, common wall, floor and pushrod side as much as possible. Even on a smaller 340 this makes really great power. Now keep in mind, the port will be too fast just on it's own on your bench...but if you put an intake manifold on it and bolt the carb on it you'll see why, at least on the sb mopar, a fast port is not always wrong. I won't say the FPS numbers I shoot for but you can make the port too fast. And almost never too slow!! Hope this helps, if you guys don't want any further input I'm OK with that and won't hurt my feelings ;-)
Brian, you have touched on several areas that peak my interest here. I have played around with undercutting the chamber wall. For my feeble attempt I did gain some low lift flow but hurt flow after about 0.350"-0.400". I love the idea of the steep top cut angles and would enjoy a conversation about how to make that work on this head with factory 15 degree top angle. I have played around with it by sinking valves. There are so many other things you have touched on that I would like to discuss. I fully understand there are limitations on time and information sharing. I'm grateful for anything you add.

I'm going to hold off on the chamber modifications until we are finished with our initial steps 1-5. We'll try some more stuff later. I also want to try one final blending of the valve job to the chamber walls, but I will also hold that until the end of steps 1-5.

One question for now. These factory Speedmaster heads have a top cut of 15 degrees. The factory Edelbrock RPM heads that I have are cut with a zero degree top cut. Without sinking the valves or welding the head, is there a way to incorporate a steep top cut angle? This is especially a problem on the chamber wall side (the area you marked in yellow). On the SM head, I had to sink the valve 0.090" to get rid of the factory 15 degree cut in this area.