reshaping heads with liquid aluminum?

super red91

Registered User
I know that devcon and some other companies make a liquid aluminum. My question is would you be able to use this is the cylinder heads to reshape them? If not is there anything else like this that would work besides have the head welded?
 
JB weld

I've seen a bunch of guys use JB weld on heads. To reshape ports is what your talkin about right?
 
Drnaline said:
I've seen a bunch of guys use JB weld on heads. To reshape ports is what your talkin about right?

How reliable is this? I think doing it that way would worry me. Anybody else heard of this?

BTW Drnaline, you have a PM.
 
Yes, im talking about reshaping the ports. What are port plates?

Will Jb weld do that job? Is it capable of standing up to the high heat in the head? Has anyone every done anything like this?
 
The ports that need the most reshaping are the exhaust ports. Exhaust gasses right out of the chamber are way hotter than any of those liquid aluminum or JBweld products can handle. Like 1200 F ?? I would be skeptical of that working for very long. I found a local welder that does a lot of prototype injection mold tooling work. He welded my exhaust ports adding abouta 3/4" in the area I specified. He charged me $100 for both heads. When he did that, all my valve seats fell out. So after I reshaped the ports to how I wanted them to look, I had to get new valve seats put in. If your gonna reshape the ports, you'd prolly want new seats anyway so you can run bigger valves. It turned out that my heads were not as warped as one might think from all the welding heat and they straightened out with about .010" of resurface.

To figure out how to reshape the ports, modeling clay works great on a flow bench.
 
Please excuse the brief hijack. Sorry.

Sorry for this brief hijack but.......Drnaline, shoot me an email. We are planning on meeting up on Sat. May 15th.
 
I've seen exhaust ports repaired with epoxy before, although this was on an all-out race engine that was torn down in between runs (translation: the epoxy only had to last for a few seconds!). The epoxy was used to get a little more life out of the heads since they had been ported out so far that the walls were too thin and cracked. But this wasn't JB Weld, it was some better epoxy made by Manley called Miracle-seal. I wouldn't think JB Weld could take the heat.
 
Welds It makes a epoxy good to 1,700 they say . but id never try it ,

just cut grind and have em welded up, mine are welded and reshaped,

and they leaked water well two ports did . had to have the heads rewelded and then they pressure test them . a pinhole was the culprit here. also good idea to have heat resistant coating applied.
 
JB weld

I had a set of 289 heads that i ported to big and cut into the exhaust water jacket. Cleaned up the head. Mixed some JB with some metal fillings from a brake lathe. Raced heads for three years and sold them.
 
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