Re: Head work

Posted by Bob Kerr on November 27, 2001 at 10:03:07 from (64.12.104.189):

In Reply to: Head work posted by Ludwig on November 27, 2001 at 06:24:15:

I had the head done on my 10-20 which is very close to a head for a regular and here is what I had done. The tractor sat for 30-40 years outside and the all but 2-3 valves were stuck very tight. I had to use the torch to get the guides heated up to get the valves out. Once the valve came out they had been exposed to mouse whizz and were rusted bad where they seal and would have been very little left of them after grinding. The same went for the seats which are just plain cast iron and are part of the original casting. They had to cut out the head at the seat area and install replaceable seats on every valve opening.The machine shop may try to talk you into buying hardened seats, On a Regular engine, hardened seats are totally unessesary and may acually cause excess wear on the valve faces.They don't have high valve spring pressure or high lift cams with high RPM that cause a valve to slam hard into the seat.Just use plain old cast iron seats and save yourself a few bucks.The seats are very easy to get so don't worry about trying to find them . The machine shop can order them ok. I also had to replace every valve. One spring was bad from being compressed for years(that valve was open when the engine last turned over)so I had to replace it. The rest checked out ok which was a (at this point) a pleasant suprise!I broke one of the valve guides when I took out the valves and the machine shop broke another when they knurled the old worn guides back to the proper size, so I had to replace 2 guides which are available from Rice Equip.The machine shop doesn't have a hot tank like most people know about. They have a new machine cooks the crud dry (like a self cleaning oven)then tumbles it and blasts it lightly in beads. All the crud just curls up and falls off!The head came out super clean, even in hard to get to places a hot tank normally misses.The put in the seats and ground the seats and valves and tested them with a vacuum tester. After I got the head back, it looked good enough to put on an Indy car engine! All I can say is boy does it run super nice!!!I did spend a ton on it, but looking back now I guess the $487 I spent was well worth it. One thing you will need to do though, Any machine shop you take it to is used to working on late model engines and they have very different tolerances for things like the valve stems to the guides. You do not want super close tolerances there!! your Regular engine dose not pump a flow of oil to the rockers(that helps cool valve stems as well as lube parts) and the valve train,You have to lube those parts with an oil can in the trough on top of the rocker shaft. Too tight a tolerance there will cause the valve stems to overheat,gaul and then lock up!Also be sure to tell them that since there is no water pump, the head will run much hotter than they are used to seeing! Remind the guys that this engine runs at about 1100 RPM wide open and doesn't need race car tolerences to last a long time. I had to go over this with those guys for a couple hours before they caught on so just be patient with them (and smile a lot). One thing they hate is being told how to do their job so be sure to use some tact, or they may just ignore you and do it their way and then you might have to pull it apart later to redo it right.If you have a video tape of a Regular running you might even take to them and show them what they are going to be working with. They rarely ever get to see stuff like that put together and running so they may get a kick out of it.I took my 10-20 over there after I got it running and they loved it and saw what I was trying to tell them about the tolerences first hand. Good luck with it and hope to see it at a show next year.

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