head bolt bulge in runner?

You shouldn't hit any water there but you can't remove it all or you'll go through into the valve cover area. Ask me how I know.....

Take it down a little and smooth it out and leave it at that to be safe. Same goes for the pushrod pinch area and the valve cover bolt protrusions. I found out the hard way that core shift also happens with heads. Or maybe their molds aren't exactly right on. Nevertheless I measured how much I could safely open up the pushrod pinch area on one and and ported it out and had no problem but on the intake runner adjacent I went through the casting. Seemed to be at least .050 thinner on that one. Luckily I have a buddy that repaired my screw up. After that I measured each one individually.

My X heads had minor bowl porting when I first started on them. Really all that was done is the guy that did the valves cut deeper into the pocket area so their was no lip there.

I opened up the pushrod pinch as much as I felt safe and shaped the valve guides and straightened out things the best I could. After doing these I know why guys charge so much to do this. It's very time consuming.

Here's the numbers before and after. You'll notice the exhaust numbers are a little low. That's probably because I took too much off the floor. Live and learn and leave the exh. floor alone except to grind off the high spots and polish it.

Lift Int. Before.............Int. after...........Exh. before........Exh. after
.100----60........................64....................50...................53
.200----120......................129...................104.................107
.300----173......................188...................131.................135
.400----210......................236...................143.................155
.500----220......................243...................146.................165
.600----215......................248...................148.................170

BTW: A good valve job with the right angles and back cutting the valves helps quite a bit too. That gave about a 5-8 cfm increase throughout on mine.