I am porting E7TE stock heads for a 1989 F-150 302. Does anyone know if there are any problems with welding inside the runners for the purpose of filling in the air injection hole and the small dimple preceding the hole. The porting job would look much better if there wouldn't be any problems associated with doing this. I'm not concerned with the loss of the air injection system- just screwing up the heads some way. I did this on a set of practice heads- filled in the areas and ground them smooth with a carbide bur and it looks good. Any thoughts on doing this out there??

Thanks

Randy

 

You can weld up the holes. If it were me, I would not worry about them. One reason is welding cast iron is a pain without the right stuff to do it with. Iron needs to be preheated before the welding, then cooled very slowly afterwards or it will crack. I have tried to weld cast at home several times, it never works real great. The few times it has worked was when I basically just put a small tack on the part, so no real heat was made. If it ain't some thing that will see little heat or stress brazing is usually better. But a cylinder head has to stand up to both. I can't picture the holes hurting flow a whole lot. Pictures I have seen of heads prepped by the mustang crowd for racing didn't have the hole plugged. Beside that a typical Ford exhaust port doglegs bad enough to be more of a problem for flow than the resistance of gas blowing across a 1/4 hole. My opinion: it can't be worth the trouble to weld it yourself or the cost of having a shop with the equipment to do it. I'm working on a port and polish job on a set of GT40-P heads right now. They don't have the annoying air injecting ports, just a bump in the roof that I guess was a provision for the air injection that was never used. I got rid of the bump completely when I matched the port to a Fel-pro header gasket. Of course, that is on the "P" head were there is plenty of material to hog around on at the roof of the port.