Da Nailhead adventures by whatever

4 minute(s) of a 113 minute read

It's been some time!

Well, the engine owner was kinda low on money, so I was forced to finish the project on my own.

I could just drop it, but I still wanted to finish it, because it did cost me a lot of time, effort and some sacrifices. And the whole engine is kinda tricky in details, if done right it can have a lot of power and if done badly, it can die pretty quickly. And if I do something I want to learn and take as much experience as I can.

The head work took a looot of time! Cast iron heads were really killing me.

So in April it was like that.

Head #1

Head #2

It wasn't ideal, the seat-to-wall radius was still quiet rough, but it looked good.

Suddenly, while doing the intake bowls I got into some real problems.

Yeah! It's a hole! Guess, the casting was way too thin that in the other 7 intake ports, or might have been rusted from the inside. So I was in deep sh-t.

I've found a local guy and asked him to weld it.

Looked good, but didn't work. I took the cylinder head to pressure check the water passages at an engine shop and it was spilling water all around.

Tried brazing

Didn't work again. Tried brazing more - the water was going under the brazing and spilling again.

And so I got mad a little bit, ground all the stuff we brazed and drove some 1000 miles for spraying nickel. That's some interesting tech - air/metal powder mixture is pressurized and heated which results in a supersonic metal "adding".

Too bad for #2 head, it was all yellow-goldish due to constant hot water pressurized checks.

Well, the "powder metal man" had blown some 5.5 bars (80 psi) of supersonic air and we got some holes.

And it was covered with several layers of powder nickel.

The blue marker shows the edge which I shouldn't ever touch and it was the place which actually didn't hold pressure in the next pressurized water check...

It was so sad for me, so I came in to film it.