hey guys now that my van is finally legal and legit and i have some extra money to blow. im getting a set of heads this weekend to start porting. then hopefully in a few weeks or so ill be done. ive seen 1 site that shows you everything about porting/polishing your heads. really informal but i was hoping to get more. ive got a carbide bit set but does anyone know if lowes or home depot have the sandpaper rolls or not? also, im hoping to port out the intake. now since theres a lot of vacuum things attatched to it, i was wondering if this is a bad idea. now on a different topic, does anyone know how to get better throttle response? when i snap the throttle you can hear like a vacuum spirt, then it revs up. any ideas how to improve this? also, how do you find out what gears are in your rear end? and what is better? i want a balance between speed and torque. o yea, the most important, its a 91 3.0 shorty. under dog version (no options) thanks for the help.

 

It's really easy to screw up your heads when porting them. Be careful not to go too big. Concentrate mainly on cleaning up the rough edges in the valve bowls.
I wouldn't touch the intake because you can't easily reach very far into it and grinding dust etc will get in and be hard to clean out.
The last time I ported heads I used sandpaper rolls from Mr. Gasket. http://www.mrgasket.com/ProductDetai...&minselection=
I've seen some speed shops that had them in stock. Otherwise I'm sure they can be ordered pretty quickly.
Make sure when you're doing any grinding or polishing that you wear a dust mask. otherwise you'll have black boogers

 

yea intake is being left alone. im going for a mild job on this set of heads and the set that im taking off will be my happy heads when i have enough money to bump up the rest of the engine. thanks for the advice!

 

Dont know why your 3.0 has the hesitation. My '90 3.0 doesnt. As soon as you tap the gas, it revs.

 

when you start porting concentrate around the valves, this is where most power is to be gained, the exhaust side is easier as the gasses head up and round, however the valve guide is generally in the way so smoothing this path will help, the roof of the exhaust tract is best to be working on as the floor has little turbulance, as opposed to the intake, on the intake run your finger up the valve on the floor of the port, you will feel a ridge, concentrate of smoothing that ridge out, this will help stop the gasses loosing velocity before it hits the back of the valve, if your taking the valves out then polish the stems as this also leads to build up of turbulance, the ports should be left in there grinded state as polishing them creates fall out if some of the heavier fuel particles. There are many books on the porting of heads, some more specific to Fords than others, ony man is Vizard, he did a lot of work in the 70's and 80's on Essex, Pinto, Kent and Lotus/ford heads alomg with Mini's. Hesitation could be a couple of things, first I'd check for vacum leaks (hmm! a bit of an oxymoron that since you can't actually leak a vacum) make that air leak in the vacum circuit, chack teh choke machanism is't staying on and chect the timing is doing it's stuff, however it sounds like loss of vacum that's causing your hesitation.