Everyone,

Well, I thought I was ready for most of the challenges I might encounter while porting the W2 heads for my stroker build, and for the most part things went pretty well.

Here are the results of the MP porting template based work, a pure DIY effort, and keep in mind I am not trying to achieve some sky-high flow numbers, rather I simply wanted to remove the factory extra material to optmize the air flow. I have yet to bring these to a shop to do a test flow, and am in fact curious how they'll compare to my previous DIY effort on factory '596 castings.

Anyways, a few pics:

1)

2)

...and then this happened:

3)

Sooo...alright, not ideal, but I've ran into this issue before, albeit a different spot (I broke through on my '596 castings on the intake port roof right into the head bolt recess) patched up with epoxy, ran for 10 yrs never a problem.

I think what helps here is that this is probably the coolest part of the port (being right at the intake and exposed to cool incoming air. So I've got my J-B Weld tubes here, was going to mix the stuff and patch it up, but then an idea poped into my head: maybe I could epoxy in a half-shell of a copper tube on the other side to give the actual port epoxy a bit of "back-end" support?

Let me explain further, in essence I'm thinking of cutting open a copper tube and using a half-shell to epoxy it in on the pushrod hole side of the port. Since there is no real mechanical stress there I think this should hold just fine. The benefit here would be that the actual intake port fix (on the inside) can be pretty thin, basically just enough to smooth things over.

I'm curious though what you guys make of that idea? Asking for more trouble than worth it?

Oh, and when I said above "...I thought I was ready...", I literally used a sonic thickness checker on each port, this only happened once I put a sand roll on the port to finish up the walls. Quite possible I either spent a little too much time in that one spot, or maybe applied too much pressure.

The roll did NOT initially go right through but left a discolouration...as soon as I spotted it I could indent the metal with my finger, it was onion skin thin in that spot...LOL, so I removed all that excess thin material, which of course make the overall hole larger.