Milling engine heads on a bench top mill?

[P. Waller]

I have machines that would machine that head, but I take my head work down the road a 1/4 mile and have the automotive machine shop do it. Just the setup time on a mill takes longer than running it down the road.

What he said.

 

[tq60]

Ive done old type iron engine heads that had soft copper asbestos gaskets.......but I would not face a modern ally head that goes with the hard steel shim gaskets,unless I could be sure of the accuracy required...........In fact Ive found heads recoed by cylinder head exchange shops are often no good due to out of spec machining.........and leak coolant on fitting.

A friend has had this happen.

If you have a straight edge then visit an automotive shop and after you get quote ask to check their work meaning place your straight edge across some finished work.

Our friend had a performance engine that ate head gaskets.

Their high dollar machine was out of alignment and trashed block and heads.

Check the shops work first.

If they have grinder it is Likely okay but poor maintenance or age poor operator could allow poor outcome


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[scattermaster]

Hmmmm!
In my mind I had ordered the Delux version and it's listed at 19.7" X travel BUT, I just looked and sadly I was mistaken...
I guess it's a moot point anyway. It sounds like the consensus is that I should leave that to the experts.
Guess I'll just have to find something else to whittle away at.
thx guys.

 

[cjtoombs]

I worked at an automotive machine shop back in the 80's and early 90's. Unless the head is marked by the head gasket (indented) or had more than .004 warp, we didn't recomend surfacing it. You could get by with more warp on a long 6 cylinder head. The head bolts will easily pull that out of the head. If you are looking to reduce chamber volume to raise compression, we generaly recomended staying under about .020 off the heads, as you can start having intake fitment problems (unless you modify it, as well). Some shops use a grinder, some use a sanding bed, some use a big fly cutter usualy refered to as a rotary broach. We used a Van Norman 562 surface grinder that gave a superb finnish, some of the ones that use cutters don't leave a very good finnish, depending on how the cutters are set up. The thing about automotive machine shops is that the machines are highly specialized which makes setup much easier than you can do on a comparable general purpose machine. This makes the cost for work relatively low, since setup time is minimized. I have a well equiped shop and still take most of my work of that type to the automotive machine shop in town in order to save my shop time for stuff I can't get done elsewhere, and because it is relatively cheap.