very cool chris.

can someone please comfirm. i need the right fitting and pressurize the cyclinder over 180? and i also need the right spring compressor tool? my best buddy is the evo tech and he is letting me use the timing belt tool, so ill call him in the morning and see if he has the spring compressor.

 

Where do you get this 180 psi value? Woulnd't 120 be enough to keep the valve seated?

Ben

 

got it from there.

 

No i mean where did he get it from. Is this just the choosen number that is safe? Or is that is the amount of pressure required to keep the valve seated/

Ben

 

Anything over 100 psi is more than enough to keep the valve closed. You have to still be carefull not to hit the valves or it may still drop. I do hope you have the right tools to compress the springs as the standard spring compressors will not work because of limited space. I would personally not remove the head. Good luck. If for some reason you feel unsure of what youre doing I would highly suggest you dont attempt this job since any slight screwup will cost you big bucks.

 

Why go through all of the trouble to not remove the head. Your already doing head studs. It would actually be more work to try to do springs and retainers on the car than to just remove it. Do it right just take the head off. Don't chance f-ing something up just because you thought it would be easier.

Also if you have never had the head off of a car I would suggest you let somebody who has do it.

 

is head porting easy ? u can sand it off rough part with somekinda grinding machine?

 

There's a lot of skill involved in head porting. It's not difficult to take off metal and make things bigger, but that won't necessarily give you better performance. Definitely a job best left to the serious home gearhead or a pro.

 

Totally agree, except for the PSI. That is way too high, you could turn the crank with that kind of CP (cylinder pressure). 50 PSI is certainly adequate, all you are doing is holding the valve in place.

 

I have replaced the valve springs and retainers myself with the head still on the car using the compressed air method. For me it was a disaster - here's what happened.

I ordered up a set of Ferrea valve spring and retainers. The Ferrea valve springs are a dual coil design, with inner and outer springs. They are a good product with a well proven history. To compress the valve springs I purchased an inexpensive lever type valve spring compressor - this tool is where all my problems started. I should have spent the $300 or so to buy a genuine Mitsubishi "on the car" valve spring compressor. If I were to do this again I wouldn't hesitate to spend the money for this tool.

The actual swap went fairly easily except for re-installing the new retainers. Everything fit well, but the lever type compressor had trouble providing enough leverage to properly compress the springs - even with a beefy 200+ pound helper compressing them while I installed the keepers on the top of the valves. It sometimes took 2 or 3 tries to get the springs compressed enough to quickly seat both keepers. After everything was together I re-inspected the job and everything looked good - to the naked eye. I then installed my new cams and finished putting the car back together.

About 500 miles after all the work, my car developed an intermittent miss. I did a compression check and a few other basic diagnostics. Everything seemed fine so I changed the plugs and kept driving. The miss kept showing up very ocasionally through about 2K miles and 2 track days. By noon on the 2nd track day the car was showing obvious problems - the miss sudddenly was present 75% of the time the car was under power. I nursed it home and re-checked the compression - three consecutive times. The first time all 4 cylinders were good - the second time there was a problem with #2 - the third time everything was fine again. OK - time to pull the engine apart...

When I removed the valve cover, I noticed that 3 of the 16 sets of valve springs had broken either one or both of their coils - ouch! I called up the vendor and asked him about the problem - never had it happen before. He called Ferrea and followed up with them - this sounded unusual to them, but they offered to replace the parts if there was a problem. I shipped the whole head to the vendor for inspection. The result was that they found problems with the install of the keepers. Because my helper and I were unable to keep enough presure on the springs and had to rush the keeper install some of the keepers didn't seat completely. This allowed the retainers to tilt slightly and caused the coils to rub against each other. When I though about the reassembly and installing those keepers it made sense - I wasn't really able to verify that the keepers were properly seated when we put them in. The vendor was Mark from Quantum Racing, and he took good care of me. I ended up paying for the springs, but he took care of all the head checking and re-assembly for me - Thanks Mark!

Anyway - before he re-assembeled everything I figured I would have the head sent out and ported as long as it was already at his shop. I now have the ported and re-assembeled back in my garage and should be putting my car together this weekend.

I guess in summary I'd like to say be sure to use the right tools and and don't "half-***" any part of the process. I was lucky my failure didn't didn't take out my entire engine.

 

How is everything now?

 

just my 2 cents but you ask any prof. engine builder and he will tell you the right way to put studs in taking the head off... esp. alum. head.. do u really want to take the chance and be the unlucky one who has had prob from doing it this way... just wanted to pass that along to you..

 

well with my install, everything went easy. i guess its because my springs weren't dual. so i was able to put easily put the keepers on. a buddy on this forum did the same type of install with dual valve springs, but it took twice as many people.

 

What springs/reatiners did you do with? Any reason to upgrade the valves?

 

hey justin its rob... whats been going on. well not much around here. tried calling you today. all my parts went to the coaters on friday... and i just got my head back today from complete porting..... but give me a call... but ill talk to you later