Haven't posted in a few weeks. While at the Cup race i came across a nice looking ported head with a recent valve job. Fella was asking $450 with some small cams. It was a good price fir j model head, with cam tower conversion and stainless stock size valves. I git budy racing as didn't think about the head again until we were loading up at the end of the event. He had already boxed the head up but pulled it out and sold it to me for $250. Cool. Well I got home and started messing with it the next day. I typically unload all of the valves, drop a cam into the rmpty head and rotate it to be certain there's no resistance. Dang that cam rolled great and seemingly passed my test. I was feeling darn good about the deal until i decided to check end play. The cam moved way more than it should have from side to side but most unexpectedly, it moved up and down on one end even with the cam caps tightened. Okay. No real big deal i thought. I'll mixed and match cam caps from a spare stock head to take away the clearance. Wrong answer. Now the cam is extremely difficult to turn. Alright, I've run into this before. You simply need to massage the cam bearings until you get free play. I commence to playing that scenario and finally got very little rotating resistance. Cool. Ummm, maybe not so cool because the up and down play is beyond my comfort level. Tried a few more things and concluded this head will require line boring of the cam journals. Crap. Junk head. Back to my original ported head. No harm, no foul just $250 lighter in the pocket. The cams would work great in a street motor but are much to small for anything i would ever build.
Moving ahead with the first plan.
