Blew my headgasket again and decided to fix it right this time. About half a year before I had traded some parts for a complete 89 2.5l turbo engine and since my engine had a non-turbo head on it I sent the spare head off to the machine shop to be worked over. I had all the standard stuff done to it; cleaned, valve guides, decked, 3 angle valve job on the seats, and back cut valves.
Just a few shots of how things looked after coming back from the machine shop.
And my back cut valves which is suppose to improve flow.
I know very little about head porting but I still wanted to clean things up a little. I just used a dremel and some sanding drums to knock down the rough stuff.
A few people in the turbo dodge world have been doing some mix and match engineering and have figured out a few tricks in the valve train. On the right is my stock spring and retainer. On the left is a conical spring from a 3.3l Dodge v6 and a retainer from a 3.1l Chevy that will work in place of the stock stuff. The conicals are suppose to keep their spring rate over a much longer time and if nothing else the chevy retainer is way lighter. They have also figured out that dodge 2.4l lifters along with some washers acting as shims can be used in place of the 2.5l lifters. The 2.4l lifters don't colapse at higher RPMs like the stock ones, are quieter, and if nothing else cheaper. I didn't remember to snap any pictures of those before sticking them in the head.
An adjustable timing gear from FWD performance. Not sure how much that will help but it can't hurt.
Here I have everything back together and ready to go on my engine sadly that wasn't going to happen. After pulling my old head off to put this new one on I figured out what the tapping noise coming from my engine had been. Piston slap. My pistons were flopping all over the place in their bores. With the head already off most of the hard work was already over so I decided to just go ahead and pull the rest and rebuild the short block aswell. You will have to wait till my next up date which should be coming along shortly to read about that.
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