The whole thing started when I discovered water in the oil. Theres a whole nother post on that though, along with several other posts on differant problems and discoveries. Anyway, Pulled the engine and checked everything out with the mic's and have a whole sheet full of numbers. Everything was in specs but the mains at .004", but according to general concesus here on this site that is still acceptable so I left them alone. Specs on the mains were .0005"-.0025" The only damage is a little bitt of pitting at the very top of #4 cyl.( where the water was collecting in the first place) but it is above where the rings ride on the cylinder. The block is already bored .030" and the pistons only have about 150 miles on them and didn't feel like boring and new pistons again so I left it alone. Did the oiling mods listed on this site, also did the port matching and some grinding on the exhaust side. Started it up yesterday and seems to be running good. Won't get it on the road till probably next week. I know that it won't pull like my 97 Powerstroke did but I'm sure it will do the job just fine till I get another one. I'll just miss being able to pull 14,000# all day long and still get 15mpg

Just wanted to thank ya'll for all the good information and the help. I will probably be asking more questions when I start the conversion from full time 4 to part time.

Thanks fellers

 

Did you do the port matching yourself? I'm collecting info on that in another post and trying to get all the facts I can before I attempt it. If you did, could you post or message me with what you did and how you did it?

 

I just used a piece of stiff cardboard and some adhesive spray to sort of glue the cardboard to the intake. I also put the bolts through the intake and through the cardboard to keep it from moving and cut out the ports of the intake. basicly I just made a template and transfered it to the head, scribed it out on the head. Then used a die grinder with a carbide burr and a flapper wheel and hogged out the ports to match. I left the ports just a little shy of the actual size they needed to be ( 1/16" +/-) and camphered the edges of the port just a little bigger then the template ( 1/16" +/-)with the flapper wheel to give a smooth transition and for fear of going to far with the burr. I started the grinding about 1/2"-5/8" into the ports and gave them a gradual funnel affect out to the edge of the port.

The exhaust side was really simple. The ports on my exhaust manifolds were already bigger then the ports on the heads and by using the gasket as a guide determined that the ports in the head were pretty much centered in the ports of the exhaust manifold so I just used the burr on the head ports to remove the little bit of lip that was on the edge of the opening and removed any of the rough casting imperfections inside the ports as far as I could reach. I then used a very large heavy file ( poor mans mill ) on the manifolds to make sure they sat flat on the heads with no rocking back and forth just to help them seal better.

This is the first time I've done this sort of thing to a set of heads so I'm no pro at this so I can't tell you that how I did this is right or wrong, but that's how I did it.