Derek

Yea I hate guesswork too. It's as simple as "that's how Honda does it". I never considered it because I don't like to change Honda's design much. Looking at it again I don't know if you could make the journals big enough to clear the lobes and not hit the tower bolts. Also it would make plumbing the VCT a little more difficult. Interesting thought though.

Finished machining the cam towers. I already posted some of these on my blog and facebook page but figured I'd go ahed and dump them here as well. First up is really the last but since is the most interesting part I figured I'd lead off with it. So from V3 forward I have been working on making sure that people who wanted to upgrade to VCT down the road wouldn't be stuck buying a whole new head. This has turned out to be pretty difficult but not impossible. Complete redesign of the valve cover and modifying the pattern, new timing cover design and pattern, modification to the front of the head and redesign of the cam towers. Finding room to fit two oil delivery systems was the trickiest part. Here is a shot of two number one towers with the caps off. VCT on top and regular on the bottom. The only modification to the head and cam towers to switch to VCT is to mill two channels from the 6mm holes out to the oil grooves. To be clear you will need VCT cams and all the timing and valving bits. My opinion on VCT is still that it's probably an expensive gadget but I needed a new challenge and figured I'd see if I can make it happen. So if you are planning on a budget build I wouldn't be holding out for VCT:) Here are some in progress pics. Regulars to this thread have seen this stuff before but people seem to like shots of me making chips. Thanks Derek

I would use the faro for sure. Develop guide curves and cross sections from the points. Use those to develop poly surfaces then convert to mesh. If you are trying to improve the flow with CNC machining then the wall thickness data is as important as the actual port shape.

Having done a fair amount of this work in the long run you may be better off getting your data from a touch probe in a mill or a digitizing arm. Getting a proper scan can be really challenging. When I did the Honda head I split the port along the casting part line then created a two piece mold with spacers to make up for the band saw blade kerf. I then made a resin plug and scanned it. Since I wanted something I could develop I ended up pulling curves from the mesh and used them to create my ports. Derek

Yea but you know when a thread is going off the rails

I'm flattered but I can see a conflict since I'm a vendor as well as a user. I nominate JSM. He always seems to have a level headed approach.

Cam core lathe work finished. Gun drilled S7 tool steel. Eight standard and two VCT. My poor little lathe got quite the workout:) These are the fronts of the VCT cams. I'm copying the K20 dimensions as closely as possible. For some reason they use a very shallow feed groove on the cam bearing and a much deeper groove on the phaser end. Number one cam tower with the VCT grooves machined in. The drilled holes lead down to the head and the grooves will line up with the cam when I bore the towers. The letter C is where the intake cam will be. Although that is a coincidence as this is tower 1 set C. The next step is numbering the towers and after that they are machined as sets. I'm doing five sets this run. Making progress! Derek

Thanks for the info. Yes I meant either would do a good job of consistency. Seems like ethanol and dry ice would be easier to manage. I'm going to talk to my local guy. He has the skills for sure it's just that I know the value of technology and precision and his gear is on the older side. My valve seat didn't fail due to lack of technology. It failed because of poor installation and a Serdi won't help that. Derek

I like how they finally timed how long it took to make one of the parts. They really should buy a cheap CNC plasma table though. The guy has mad skills for sure but this is 2017 after all

I believe I called him and he doesn't have a Serdi. He also seemed to take offense that I asked. Maybe I caught him at a bad time. I have a local guy here that can do it with the older style equipment. I'm really thinking about cutting the seat pockets on mine myself. I mean it's in the 4th axis and it should be more accurate than lining up via the guide. A tech at Ferrea told me about mixing dry ice and acetone to shrink the seats. Or I may look at nitrogen. It seems that shrinking the seats in a controlled bath would give predictable results. My guides and seats were installed by someone who was very capable. They were just having a bad day. I'm hoping to minimize that by going with the Serdi. I may be fooling myself though. Thanks Derek

Man that really sucks. I was just exchanging PMs a month or so ago. So sad. My condolences.

Those are all the pics I have. I will say that it is still in perfect shape with no de-lamination and up until I blew the motor it was parked out in the Florida heat every day. Realistically I'm thinking it's better than stock as far as longevity goes. I did the SEM fill the crack method and it just cracked in another place. Anything you paint on is a temporary fix. My experience thermoforming speaker panels made me realize the problem isn't the quality of the cover but the stresses put against it when you install it.

Question for you Florida peeps. I'm looking for a machine shop in central florida with a Serdi valve machine. After my problem with V1 dropping a seat I'm inclined to steer away from any shop that doesn't do seats on a regular basis or with a modern machine. Rebello is hooked up with someone but I really don't want to ship my head across the country and back if I don't have to. Thanks Derek

Caps get a bad rep because they don't fit perfectly and then they are installed poorly. If you look at what I had to do in my thread in order to get it to fit you'll see that there is a ton of material that needs to be removed.

Here is how I did mine.

Silly me:)

Single stage or base/clear. What brand. Absolutely need new hardener. If you are paying to get it done you may have trouble getting the paint shop to get onboard using paint of unknown origins. Derek

Instead of spamming this forum maybe you should go away.

That looks normal to me for glass beading. Raw castings are usually shot blasted then machined. I found that putting parts in a vibratory finisher after blasting restores some of the luster. I can fit my DOHC valve cover in my finisher. If you look closely you can see the difference. V3 is in the foreground and it has been shot blasted and then run in my vibratory finisher with burnishing media and liquid. V2 in the middle has only beed shot blasted. You can see a slight luster on V3. Here are two parts I glass beaded. And here they are after vibratory finishing. There are many types of finishing media. Burnishing media is what gives the parts the luster. Derek

Well that looks like fun. I was messing with Rfactor for a while and even started modeling a 240Z for it. I decided to make a twin cam head instead:) The thing I noticed was it's more about the physics settings on the car more than the look of the car. Garbage in garbage out. I may have to pull my driving seat out of storage!

I think what project binky showed me the most was that you can fit stuff in the space pretty easily. Getting it all to work properly without killing you is the tough part. What good is all that effort if it handles like a mini van.

V3 is going on a tall deck 3.5L with a custom crank and pistons. Normally aspirated. Should be high 4's for horsepower.

Since I'm planning on trying out VCT on my build I figured I'd better finalize the valving. For me it's alway a balance of (not necessarily in this order) function, manufacturing and style. On the VCT it's always function first since what's the point if it looks better than it works. I knew what valve I wanted to use ( manufacturing) and where it needed to go (function) but not how to make it work ( manufacturing ) and not have it be butt ugly (style). I picked the valve I did because of the fact it came with it's own manifold. This makes manufacturing a lot easier since I don't have to do any precision boring. Since it's an open pressure (bleed) circuit believe I need to locate the valve as close to the cam phaser as possible to try and minimize the response lag. I also have to deliver a pretty good volume of oil at times where a fast response is necessary. I mapped out the valve with the 4 circuits. Oil in, 2 drains, advanced and retard. The valve is a spring return and defaults to retarded cam position. Retarded seems to be the default for the phaser as well. Which makes sense. Lets start with the fact that I'm not crazy style wise about hanging this valve off of the front of the timing cover. But it's the closest I can get it to the phaser and still be able to plumb it. Here is a shot of the final plumbing. Red is oil in. Light blue are the drains. brown is retard and purple is advance. Since I didn't want the valve there to begin with you can imagine how I felt when I finally gave in to the fact that I needed a .625" thick manifold block to handle all the cross drilling. I tried a bunch of scenarios but it would have added a ton of time to the machining because of doing that kind of work on a short production run casting is tough. I also had to flip the valve 180 from my original position to get the advance and retard ports to match the head. It's all about compromises in life:) Derek:

Shielded wire and single point grounding will be your friend.

Family Portrait. V1 V2 V3 I snapped this before I shipped V3 to Rebello and V2 went for a visit to it's owner. Probably (hopefully) the last time they will be all together. My feeble attempt at an art shot Things move pretty quick around these parts:)