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MG MGB Technical - Cylinder head porting

What can one expect to pay for cylinder head porting,
& complete rebuilding of a B cylinder head?
Any recommended shops?
Len Fanelli

Len - talk to Peter www.burgesstuning.free-online.co.uk/‎ but ask him about the incidence of faulty heads before you send yours to him. It may save you time to ask him to find you a good one.
Roger
Roger W

The porting, balancing is very time consumptive, hence expensive in labour terms alone. Add to that the cost of crack testing, hardened valve seats and their cutting, new guides, skimming, new valves and springs and you're looking at £400+ ($650?) I should think. I have a stage ll head in the workshop so can testify to the many hours I spent porting/balancing. Not to mention the cost of materials, Swarfega and oh so frequent showers.
Allan Reeling

Len-
Beware, not all headwork is of the same quality. Competent work can be done only with a flowbench and lots of prior experience. Many well-intentioned local Good ‘Ol Boy Hot Rod Engine Builders (the ones that the local pimply Hot Rodders call “experts”) have reduced MGB cylinder heads to scrap metal. Once this happens you will spend at least as much money buying another cylinder head and getting the needed parts for it as you would have spent shipping the cylinder head to a qualified professional, having him do the work, and then shipping it back again, complete with insurance. The one thing that you cannot cheapo your way through on an engine is the headwork. Without access to a flowbench, blueprints, precision measuring instruments, a good working knowledge of the mysteries of siamesed ports, and the specialized manual skills, the likelihood of an amateur doing it correctly on a first attempt is so small that it makes me shudder. How do I know? About thirty-two years ago I worked for Rockwell International making valves for use in nuclear power plants. The valves had to be flowed on a flow bench in order to be government certified for use in a nuclear installation. This meant custom contouring work on their ports, all done by hand with a die-grinder-type Dremel tool. It took about three years of prior experience and a practiced eye to be able to do it right every time, and this was working daily for eight to ten hours with a flowbench, repeatedly making small contour corrections on every individual port! Ship the cylinder head to Peter Burgess or purchase one from him outright, you will be glad you did.
Stephen Strange

Listen to what Stephen said.

I had my cylinder head ported by a well-intensioned builder in the United States, very well known around MGB's. The ports where so big that I had absolutely no low and mid range torque. These so called professionals forget what a street MGB is all about. They are all into high compression ratio's, bigger camshafts, overly port heads, high flow numbers and high end horspepower. They completely forget about the area under the torque curve or don't even know what that means.

The only one I would have do a MGB cylinder head is Peter Burgess. You will get what you paid for and then some.

Ray 1977mgb

I purchased a ported head from Peter 12 years ago and it was the best investment I ever made on my 18V engine!
Bayard DeNoie

When deciding on head porting or indeed any tuning work on an engine the first question to answer is "How do you drive the car?"

For people who want zip away from the lights but always change up at 3000 rpm the tuning package is totally different from the one that produces max speed down the Mulsanne straight ( gendames permitting!)

Whether you use Peter or follow the very good guide in his book you really need to know what you want the car to do at the end of the day ...
Chris at Octarine Services

"gendames"

French WPCs? :o)
Paul Hunt

This thread was discussed between 15/09/2013 and 22/09/2013

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