i have a 96 trans am formula, has k&n intake and borla exhaust. i have a spare 350 lt1 out of another 96 t/a with good heads on it still. a good friend of mine works at a tuner shop and has access to a flow bench and knows his ****. was wondering if anyone out there has tried to port and polish stock heads and has seen any hp gains? also at this time i would be putting on some LT's and removing my CAT's. is worth my time casue all i would be paying is about 150$ for the p&p so...any thoughts would be great! thanks guys

 

150$ is not a lot for a port job... If you have plans to upgrade the cam in the future and NEED to have the heads off yes. If you don't NEED to take the heads off then don't. Save all that for when you do your rebuild.

 

In the right hands it can be argued that ported stock heads are a BETTER choice than aftermarket for a lot of applications.

$150 is not giong to buy anything more than very light cleanup though and I am talking about skilled reshaping of the ports.

 

yes, the person i am having port the heads is very skilled in my opinion. he hasnt ever done lt1 heads before but in alot of other applications i have seen him work miracles in porting. so with the combo of lt's and porting the heads i am very interested in seeing the results

 

Ported heads and LT's will yeild good results, but they will be limited because of the stock cam. Of course the gains will directly correlate to how good the heads are and what is done. There was a guy who had an OEM LT4 cam with a set of CNC ported heads (Florida Co.) and he put down around 330 I believe, this was in a stock LT4 Corvette. In this case a set of, at the time, great heads, yeilded minimal gains because the stock cam is so limiting. Pair those heads with a better cam and he would see a dramatic increase like 50+ rwhp.

 

I have some work done to my heads and intake. Light gasked matching. Have the numbers in the sig