The porting work is looking good.

Looking great! Keep posting up your progress!

Thanks guys. Its not the prettiest job ever, but for a daily driver, I think the gains will be significant. I'm not trying to make a race engine here. You can't really tell in the pictures, but the ports are actually very smooth now. I have all of the ridges smoothed, and most of the imperfections smoothed to a reasonable level.

I'll port the second head tomorrow and get some better pictures of that. I can't wait to put these on my car.

Got some more progress done today.

Before:






After (I lapped the valves after this):










Heads are now torqued down, and I got the first set of rockers on. Then I realized it was 11:00 so I called it a night. I'll finish the car tomorrow.

thats lookin good, im interested to see how much faster it will actualley be

Looking good. Always a great feeling when you finally flip the lever on the ratchet wrench. No sweeter sound then when it first screams to life.

I finished the car last night. First thing was a lot of smoke from the engine bay from all the oil and coolant and whatever else was on the manifolds burning up. After that it was fine. Idle vibration is a bit rough, but that might be because I messed around with the upper intkake insert and modified the runner lengths. It accelerates a lot smoother than before though, and there'* definitely an increase in power from 3500-5000 rpm from before.

Also, I have a consistent and repetitive shuffling sound coming from the engine, which is louder on cold starts. Not too sure what that might be, but perhaps it will go away after I run a bottle of seafoam through the engine and change the oil afterward. There'* also the exact same light clanking sound as I heard before I replaced the heads. I've been told it could be a stuck lifter, but who knows. I didn't bother to pull the lifters to check them, as I was too preoccupied with trying to get the car running again.

Any thoughts?

Your going to need to check the tune. I'm willing to bet your LTFTs are way off. Changing the flow has a huge effect on the tune. Deal with that and see if it smooths out. When I rebuilt my engine, I changed the oil right away. then again after about a week. I've had light driving for a month or so and have another oil change planned. Clean oil may help loosen a sticky lifter. Toss in some seafoam just to make sure.

Thanks for the info. What does LTFT stand for? Pardon my ignorance, I'm still trying to learn about tuning. I have a buddy over on the w-body forums who does OBD1 tuning and discovered that using a PCM from a 95 L36, I could tune my 95 L27 with OBD 1.5. I'm still in the process of getting that set up, so I may have to deal with a rough idle for a little while.

I'm planning to change the oil tomorrow by the way, and I may even do it tonight if I have time. Thank you for the quick response.

I didnt "drill out" the 1.8 rocker arms when I put them on my heads, You want them to be machined so you know that the holes are straight and true, otherwise you could have issues with binding or what have you.

I haven't had any issues with mine in over 5,000 miles of use