[theastronaut]

A bit more practice port work. The manifold flange is offset a decent amount from the valve, so I decided to see if there was enough material to open up that side of the port wall to straighten out the port. I'll chop it up in the bandsaw to see how much wall thickness is left, and if there's enough I'll finish up the real head and drop it off for a valve job soon.










I opened up the ports from around .940" to 1.240". I came up with 1.124" using Wallace Racing's calculator for the minimum port size needed for a given displacement and rpm. This should keep the port size as small as possible to boost air speed while being big enough to pull to 8000 rpm. I tried to focus material removal in areas that would straighten the port- the roof, the port wall shown above, and rounding the short side turn. This pic shows the difference in port height compared to stock.




I bought a flycutter for the Bridgeport and trimmed the manifold at a 2.5* angle to help match the port angle a little better.




And, the car I've been hoping to find popped up back in January on marketplace and I was finally able to make contact with the owner and purchase it. The original maroon '88 I started this thread with is fairly rusty underneath. I've been torn on fixing it or replacing it, and after finding this one I've decided to swap everything over to this shell. It's really solid other than a couple spots on each rocker, and pretty straight overall. It'll be easy to strip it, then knock out the bodywork and paint so I can swap everything over from my original build.