Racecar's tuning guru - Dave Cottrell of www.djcracing.com recently performed a review of Guy Croft's Head Prep 8 valve DVD. Dave has done some porting work on Racecar's supercharged BMW E30 aswell as some cleaning up of the heads on his Formula Vee racecar. He found the DVD most informative - and will be using the lessons learned on his next batch of F.Vee heads.
Guy has worked for Brian Hart on super exotic F1 stuff, became a bit of a Fiat/Lancia engine guru and does alot of Vauxhall stuff these days aswell for historic rally boys with mk2 escorts - so he has a few ideas on head development - based on experience.
Dave Cottrell's undedited review in all it's glory:
"To set the scene the DVD by Guy Croft is more a visual text book than an overview ‘documentary’ on head porting. Think of an audio-visual version of a Haynes manual incorporating years of experience on the job. Carrying on with the Haynes manual comparison the sections of the video follow an ordered progress from basic cleaning and head prep, through many flow bench examples culminating with head modification and re-testing on the flow-bench.A large number of flow bench tests are shown and the only criticism is that not all of these are truly necessary as some runs are repetitions with slight variations in configurations. Once the main tests were shown many of these could have been cut and just the results shown and explained. From a personal point of view this was not an issue but some may find this tedious (I like my detail).In summary if you are tempted to ‘port’ a cylinder head and wondered if all the effort and wearing out a died grinder in the process was worth it this DVD will give you a good idea as to where to start and what to do/not to do. Although all the examples are based around the Fiat twin cam 8 valve head the principles and processes are applicable to any 2 valve per cylinder configuration. It also demonstrates that you do need to be careful not to make things worse and that access to a flow bench is needed if significant gains are sought."
Click here for more info on the DVD and how to orderGuy Croft Racing Engines (GCRE) Race engine construction and extreme limit cylinder head development. Unit 3B Whisby Rd., Lincoln UK, LN6 3QT tel: 01522 705222, fax: 01522 705333Click here for the DJC Racing web site - designed and built by Racecar
