Track Tac

head surfacing

foreverfaster

foreverfaster

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what is the cheapest way to surface a head.. just want to clean it up.. had head gasket blow and burnt the alum pretty good. No, the motors not for any set rules. wish i had a Bridgeport mill.. is there a shade tree version?
 
Use a thick piece of glass and various grits of sand paper.... I have used an old Formica countertop too .. wd40 the paper really well.
 
you can find cast off pieces of marble/ granite from counter companies, sink cut outs etc. or purchase a tile from a home store, thicker the better, commercial glass companies will have 1/2+ thick glass scrap pieces
Spary with spray glue and stick a full sheet to it, and move in a random pattern
 
We always used a thick piece of plate glass (about 12"x18", bought scrap from a glass company) and put various grades of emery cloth and emery paper on it. Worked the head in a figure eight pattern to keep the direction sufficiently random.
 
sundog said:
If you're sanding, removing a few thou is allot of work. If the head is burn bad like you say I would take it to a shop and get it fly cut.
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Good advice if it is going to be a lot of sanding; being a cheapskate with time on my hands, I always just sanded, though I would start with a moderately course grit if it was bad.

I'm exposing my age and the beginnings of my engine building experience here (I was a teenager); I think you just mean to get it milled. When redoing stock heads for hot rodding a flathead Ford V8, the three things we would do to the heads were milling, doming and fly cutting. Doming was to establish adequate clearance over the top of the piston after milling it to a much higher compression ratio than stock and fly cutting was machining over the valves to establish clearance there after that milling operation that took the compression ratio way up. :) :)

No fly cutting on an OHV engine.

When I got into kart racing way back and discovered that the flathead Briggs was where it was at for many classes my first thought was great, I know what to do to make these things sing, then I read the WKA rulebook and discovered that just about everything I knew to soup up a flathead Ford was illegal to perform on a kart engine. Guess whoever wrote the WKA rules that covered the Briggs knew that there were still a few of us out there that knew how to do evil things to a flathead engine, lol...
 
Maybe your definitions are different but fly cutting is a great way to resurface a head on any small 4 stroke engine.
 
Never thought about fly cutting that way (you can understand why, given the background I described above), but in thinking about it, I've concluded that a fly cutter setup would give a smoother surface finish on a head than a face mill. Is that correct?
 
We flycut the head gasket surfaces (deck and head.) Have for 40+ years. Before the 4 strokes got popular, we cut 2 cycle heads in the lathe.
A Flycutter is used on a mill and looks a bit like a boring bar with the tool held at a slight angle and you run the table X or Y instead of the quill or Z axis.
We've also used a surface grinder, and piece of sandpaper on a surface plate many times as well.
Just be sure the surface is flat and smooth.
 
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