Are you going to smooth out the welded spots?

If you mean on the inside of the port then yes. If you mean on the outside then no. I still have some more work to do on all the ports and I should be able to work on it this weekend. I also got everything to put it back together and I have 2 weeks of vacation starting next week so I should have it running next week.

Yes, inside of the port.

I've been working on the intake and heads the past few days and have the intake done and the heads mostly done. I took a couple of the ports I had fixed on the intake but don't have time to upload them today because I have two basketball games tonight. I'll try to take some tomorrow if I can and post them. With shopping for Christmas still to do I probably won't be able to get back to them until after Christmas but we'll see how that goes.

I didn't have time to work on the heads today because I had to find a vibration in the front of the Explorer that I got after going wheeling a week ago. I ended up having to replace the passenger side axle U-joint and the drivers side hub assembly. I did take some pictures of the finished intake manifold and a few of the heads.

Here are the few pictures I took of the two ports I had fixed as I was cleaning them up.










Here are the finished ports.

#1


#2


#3


#4


#5


#6


#7


#8


Here's a couple of the cylinder heads.

Exhaust






Intake

Work looks great, too bad you didn't do that before the valve job though.

Why's that? I didn't touch the guides at all and I'm going to lap them after I clean all the carbon off them.

I know, but you could have gone all out, hit the pockets, seat rims, everything.

I finished porting the heads and then cleaned and lapped the valves. After that I cleaned the heads and intake manifold, installed the new valve seals and then assembled the heads. I had a couple of valves that were pitted on the seat and I wasn't sure if they were going to leak so I tested each port after I assembled them. I ended up with one intake and one exhaust that seeped. I lapped those two valves again and was able to get the intake to seal but the exhaust was still seeping so I ordered a new valve. It came in a few days ago and it is now seals.

I started installing the headers onto the heads because it's easier to install the heads with them on than it is to try and install them after but when I went to tighten the header bolts on the driver side head I pulled the threads on three holes. Now I need to drill, tap and install helicoils on it. I did get the passenger side head on and torqued down and tonight I will fix the other head so that tomorrow I can try and have it back together and running.

There's a reason why the big dollar race heads are completely helicoiled.