After buying a spare head and looking at it in the garage for 3 months it was finally time to start work. The head came fitted with springs and valves but no cams/followers. So first job was to remove them. This was surprisingly easy. this was done one month ago but still not enough bravery to start the porting.

Working abroad, away from the caterham, for a month at a time gives me the chance to order parts to fit for when I arrive back home for my month off. Its sometimes dangerous, its as if buying bits for the car gives me a connection to it when I'm away.

Anyway I invested in a set of followers, uprated springs and caps, slightly bigger inlet and exhaust valves along with a manual timing belt adjuster. Other parts that were accumulated were mostly tooling- a set of newway valve seat cutters, some burrs for the drill and some parts for the dremel.

Courage was still not at a high enough level to start. During some slack time at work I read some excellent books that helped with the fear-How to build modify and power tune cylinder heads by Peter Burgess and David Gollan and David Vizard's How to port and flow test. I found the first of the two more relevant to what I was hoping to achieve.

There were also many websites visited the three most useful were :

http://www.dvapower.com/

http://crazyspitfire.blogspot.nl/2007/04/porting-cleaning-up-head-ports-head.html

http://arc.seloc.org/viewthread.php?tid=191709&page=1#pid3608215

Thank-you to the authors of these sites and posts for the inspiration. If they hadn't of existed I wouldn't have been standing today with drill in hand.

I now had the parts, the inspiration, enough knowledge to be dangerous and most importantly the courage to start.

So I did. Tentatively. I thought I'd start with the waterways, to get a feel for the tools and the base material. Went well until one slip with the dremel- gouge on face of head the result. Courage started ebbing again. Had a think- conclusion no big deal its got to be skimmed anyway after the porting's done.

Decided to skim down some of the valves I got with the head to use as blanks. Drill in vice, valve in drill and angle grinder in hand. Remarkably fast, and because they were surplus to requirements anyway, thoroughly fear free.

So started again, this time with precautions in place-duct tape.

It went reasonably well with the combustion chamber, well it went faster than anticipated and was not so nerve racking as envisaged. 5mm ball type cutter in drill extension seemed to work best for me for stock removal. The flatting with 80 grit spira band was ok but not as smooth as I expected and I struggled to reach everywhere I wanted to. Must get some 120 grit tomorrow and some more of the same for the dremel as well.

All this first 3 hours of work was leaving me feeling satisfied and confident, so after lunch I decided to get brave and tackle one of the inserts. This was the part that had been causing me the most anxiety.

I cut down a valve to my chosen id for the insert to use as a drift, picked up the big ball cutter and started. Round and round and round and round again. Stop, try drift and repeat until drift just passes. for all the concern I'd had about this step it was actually the step that the result actually looked like something I'd seen on the various sources mentioned above.

Then it was time for a glass of plonk and off to bed. 

Tomorrow brings cutting down a valve guide and port shaping of one inlet port I hope. The rest of the week will be consumed by the other 15, its going to be a long job.