Cylinder Head Cracks - Repairable ?

[mambastu]

Hi all,

After a bit of advice on a head that I sent away to have some machining done on. The head has passed a pressure test ok but the combustion chamber appears to have a couple of cracks between an inlet and exhaust valve on cylinders 5 and 6. The engineering company have ground away the surface a bit to check to see if it was a surface crack but it appears to go deeper as shown below :

Frankly, I spent ages porting the ****ing thing before sending it away so is it repairable or ?

Edited September 5, 2012 by mambastu

[WMDC35]

i wouldn't go down the repair path with that

[abr33]

To repair it you'd have to gouge it all out, bake the head to remove impurities, and weld the entire affected area up, provided it was even possible, then you'd have heat effected area near weld, then you'd also have stresses built in to it. I wouldn't be keen on repair.

[StevenCJR31]

you might have poured a lot of time and effort in porting etc but your safest option would be to get another head and go from there

[GTSBoy]

It's a shame you're in the UK, because if you were in Aus I'd suggest sending it to someone here in Adelaide that could pretty near build you a complete new head out of welding rod. FWIW, that head looks completely repeairable, but you'd need to find someone trustworthy to quote on it, because you're going to have to balance the amount of work and money required to pull the seats and guides out of those chambers and do all the prep, weld and refinish against the amount of time/money/effort you have otherwise sunk into the porting and anything else done to the head.

[KiwiRS4T]

^^^as above - its do-able. Is it cost effective? If you can find a shop that is prepared to stand by its work then get a price and decide for yourself.