give DIY head porting a try. lol but not what most are thinking.

My goal is just to smooth the ports and take out casting flash. I would also get a 3 angle valve job and smooth that out and have 2.00/ 1.56 valves installed. Is it worth it? Doesn't seem that hard as I am not going to open up the port any just blend. I have the time to do it and I am not expecting a huge gain but wondering if it would be worth it?

 

If you're going to do a home port job just don't hog out the heads, get aluminum bits and sandpaper rollers and be very careful, I don't know about fuel injection but on carburated vehicles from what I've been told a mirror finish isn't the best finish, you want a certain roughness, The best thing to do with your port job is to try and get each port to mimic the other ports as best as possible which is very difficult to do, theres two things you need to do, A) cc each port and make sure they all measure the same and B) flowbench each port and make sure they flow the same. ccing is relatively simple, you use some form of viscous colored fluid and a peice of plexiglass with a hole in it, fill up each port measuring carefully how much it takes to fill each port. flowbenching obviously you need.. a flowbench. I've heard a redneck method of doing this is to use a shopvac on each port and listen to the sound of the shopvac, the more restricted a port is the more the vac will lug. But this method is nowhere near accurate enough for a proffesional grade portjob but doing a simple blending and removing casting flash, maybe ccing will be enough. I doubt you will see many gains from this though. One place to work on while you're doing this is the combustion chambers, cc them with the valves in place that you intend to use and same style spark plugs you intend to use and try to shape them all exactly the same and exactly the same size and shape, and clean them up I've heard an almost mirror finish is best in the combustion chamber as it reduces surface area which has a 2 fold effect, 1) the combustion chamber is more efficient and more of the combustion energy goes to pushing the piston down and 2) it makes your chambers less likely to have preignition due to fewer sharp surfaces. The only thing is if you're messing with your combustion chamber DO NOT touch the squish area (the flat area on the head) it is very important to the design of our engine in controlling detonation (for that matter most engines)

 

I have a buddy that did a basic port on his stock LT1 heads and gained a little over 20 rwhp on the dyno.

I've done several different types of heads and intakes. IMO, if all you're doing is removing the casting flash and smoothing things out a bit you'd be wasting money on a flowbench because you're not changing the ports significantly enough to warrant it.

Slightly rough intake ports (80-100 grit finish is fine) is what you want for proper fuel atomization. You can polish the exhaust side all you want.

 

In other words you plan on only doing half the job for pretty much no gains.

If you plan on larger valves, you have to have the seats machined to accommodate the valves and they must be unshrouded. The most beneficial part of a head job is where ther greatest restriction is----in the valve pocket, about 50%, whereas the port face is only about a 10-20% retriction and inside the port before the pocket is about 25-30%. So your greatest gains will come form doing a deep pocket port, including unshrouding the valves

You are not going to save that much money if you are going to buy and have larger valves installed. I assume that you will be adding RRs, new springs, etc. while you have the heads off. Would be a waste not to do it. JMHO