Was it successful?

 

If you know exactly what you're doing and have all the proper equipment, sure it can be done in your garage. If you don't have all the necessary gear, I wouldn't try it.

 

There is definitely an art to it. Anybody can acquire the tools and means to do so but I'd imagine these quality shops which offer the service have tested difference methods countless times to find the optimal way to do it which yields the best results. So unless you have a dozen or so spare heads laying around and a Dyno @ your disposal I'd leave it to the professionals.....

 

Not so Much a Dyno as compared to good numbers on a flow bench.

 

The good thing about the heads is they have this black paint on them so you can actually see which way the air goes, follow that and you pull the numbers

 

every head porter out there started at one point,99.9% messed up the first couple sets (I know I did).porting takes a lot of experimentation,practice & understanding airflow to begin with (a long with machines & tooling)simply opening up the ports will usually hurt flow & the actual valve seat is one of the most important part to good flowing heads.with out a flowbench,i wouldn't attempt it.even if you got a increase in CFM,would they fit your build? here,we will port heads for the exact build their being used on.different CID,compression,power at a given RPM band,touring or "hotrod" builds all will be ported differently.give a idea of what the rest of your build is and we`ll at least point you in the right direction as far as where to remove material & conture

 

I have a spare Yamaha Raptor 660 motor laying around.
I was thinking of playing with the head on that just to see if it's feasible.
Since it's a spare, no harm no foul.

I agree that the port pros are pros for a reason.

 

What one would suspect would be a "good" head, visually, can be a stone turd once looked at on the flow bench.
So many factors come into play when doing cylinder head work, that experience, is the only true teacher.
Subtle things can add up to big changes, and a flow bench is needed to see them.
Thousands and thousands of dollars in equipment needed for this work.
Scott

 

There was a local tuning shop around here who prepared heads for racing bikes as well as tuned road bikes. For tuning the '70s BMW twins he started by installing smaller valves than the factory and reducing the ID of the inlet ports. I wonder how long it took him to perfect that combo?!

 

Sounds like his goal was to increase the intake velocity. This makes better torque in the lower/mid RPM ranges. At the cost of high RPM performance. The engine literally "runs out of breath."