January 2006 . . .

Even though I have a blast-furnace of a garage heater, I pretty much wimped out of working in the garage and moved my head porting, painting and assembly into the basement.

Porting was limited to gasket-matching the intake side. My Comp Cams Dual Energy cam has a split profile with longer duration on the exhaust side, so between being lazy and being lazy I opted for just work on the intake side.

I purchased a set of Comp Cams pushrods to match the cam, and also a set of stainless steel race valves from Summit Racing. The Comp Cams cam kit had everything but valves so I figured I was good to go.

Wrong!

The stock valves had two grooves, one for the locks and one for the o-ring. The new valves have one groove. WTF is with that? I found out that there are many types of valve seals. My new stainless steel valves require positive-stop seals to be used with my heads, not o-rings.

That was mistake number one.

I had taken the heads into Andy at Newport Motor Manufacturing out of North York (near Toronto) to install the seals. Prior to doing that he put in the locks that came with my cam kit and measured the installed height. It was to be 1.7" per spring spec that came with kit. Heights varied from 1.780" to 1.890".

Mistake number two -- with no thanks to Summit Racing. The new valves are longer than the stock valves -- a fact NOT indicated in the spec for the valves.

The first solution to resolve the issue is to shim the spring seats. Well unfortunately the number of shims required was too many to the point that the spring would float on the shim above the seat.

Not a complete solution.

The second solution to complement the first was to install -.050 locks from Crane to reduce the shims and drop the spring into the seat.

Eureka!

Andy surprised me (and saved me two days of work measuring and assembling) by having the heads assembled for me when I arrived to pick up the parts. There is no replacement for the right tools and a good machinist!

Here's a few pics:

I'm kinda glad that learning experience is over with!