being in the head business myself, and seeing what some of the other companies that emphasize Mopar products offer....and what they charge is always interesting to me.

i've noticed that many of the places selling heads or cylinder head services offer "stage II" porting.
i see what some places charge for this work, and have often thought to myself, "i dont know how they can do it for that price".

since ive just had a chance to evaluate a set of "stage II" ported BB Edelbrock heads from AeroHead, i thought maybe i would comment about te whole "stage II" thing.

basically, there is no standard for what this term refers to, so what you get seems to vary in terms of price, and the amount of work performed, depending on who you have do the work.

in my book, "stage II" means its the next step above "stage I". it should involve enough reworking of the head to provide a noticable improvement over the first stage.
because different heads come from the various manufacturers in different states of being "finished", there is a difference in how much work is done to each particular
type of head for the various stages, depending on what kind head of you're dealing with.
for example, an Indy SR comes with no porting or blending whatsoever, but an Edelbrock head has the blowls blended into the seats, and some slight blending at the intake port opening.
so, the way i look at it, the first stage of improvement for each of these heads is "stage I", but they dont get the same exact work done on them for that first stage of improvement from how they come "out of the box", since they aren't the same to begin with.
to my way of thinking, "stage I" should provide the first stage of improvement compared to how they come out of the box.
the SR head comes with a poor valve job and no porting or blending at all, so IMO the first stage of improvement with them is a decent valve job, and blend the bowls and intake opening.....or about the same work that an E head comes with.

basically, when you're buying a porting "package", you're buying time.
since porting by the nature of the work is often billed per hour, the only way a shop should be able to give you a price before the work has been completed is if they already know how long the job is going to take.
for this reason, i have different prices for some heads for the same "stage" of work, and....different heads often get slightly different things done to them for the same
"stage".

i've had the chance to inspect and test some work done by some other shops to see what they are offering in their head porting packages. after you get to see what some
of the other shops are producing, the differences in the prices between the various shops becomes apparent.
the bottom line is....most shops charge roughly the same price for the time they spend working on the heads.....so if you are spending less at one shop vs another, there is a good chance there is less work being done.

to try and illustrate this i have a set of numbers for the intake port flow on some SR heads, all done to each shops "stage II" level of preperation.
ive also included a set of numbers for an out of the box head as a baseline.
these numbers can all be compared apples to apples since they all came from the same bench, with the same operator at the controls, and were all tested on the same sized bore adapter, which in this case is 4.250.
the heads were positioned over the bore adapter so that the edge of the chamber, adjacent to the intake valve, was even with the edge of the bore.
also, this is the same position on the head for all tests(#4/#5).

lift----stock-----A-----B-----C
.100---66.4---68.9---64.9---68.0
.200--136.4--142.6--139.1--141.8
.300--196.4--202.3--202.5--202.5
.400--240.3--246.5--249.9--251.5
.500--275.8--283.2--286.8--293.7
.550--283.0--292.2--295.5--308.1
.600--283.0--299.4--300.9--313.4
.650--283.0--302.9--304.5--315.2
.700--283.0--302.9--308.1--320.6

what i can tell you in this case is, it isnt really the quality of the work that made for the differences in flow, but rather the quantity(however, i realize thats not always the case).
the A head had less work done to the port than the B head, which had less work done to it than the C head.
the C head had the most amount of modification, and flowed the best.

anyway....i just thought i would provide a little food for thought for those of you who may be in the market for some new heads, or having some head work done.
its not safe to assume that just because two places may use the same term....as in "stage II", that you're going to get the same level of work....or the same amount of flow.