Rusty head is better than no head at all!
 

Well I just bought one of FM's DOTD 99 heads with some supposed porting and a 94 intake manifold that all ported out.

I figure its a decent deal @645 plus 50bux to get them each cleaned.

What do u guys think? I wont be using it til next year anyway so I'll have some time to build it up to take atleast 8500 redline. Hmmm power.

i thought it just had blasting reside on it...not that it was rusty, does aluminum rust?

Aluminum does not rust... but it corrodes....

dude I so would have passed on that. sounds like a nightmare, and the cams are surprisingly tough to source (I've been trying for MONTHS). $645 + ship is just too damn much.

Plus dealing with FM on their used stuff, I've been burned twice out of two transactions.

Well I'm going to go with aftermarket cams most likely rather than trying to find oem.

I've had nothing but good transctions with FM and thats a few buys now which means alot of money hahaha.

I couldnt find anything else for the same price that I wanted to risk buying, because buying sight unseen sucks and so does trusting someone to ship it up here and not fuck up, that happened to my 99 axles, went to Fm and got them asap for cheaper..

We'll have to wait and see what happens I guess, hopefully its worth it.

645, wow, i might have been willing to sell one of my 99 heads for that much. might

fwiw

I was certainly here. Every time a machine shop has used aluminum oxide to bead-blast heads, we've seen the bottom end fail almost immediately. Like within 200 miles. And if they don't, we don't see them fail. Period. It's a pretty obvious correlation to me. In one case, we installed the head on a bone stock bottom end with under 1000 miles on it. I drove that car to California and back and it consumed 3 gallons of oil on the return trip.

We replaced approximately 15 engines on our own dime due to this because the machine shop denied responsibility and refused to believe that this could happen.

Replika Maschinen?

Happened to a buddy of mine, you can't clean all the blast material out of the oil gallies w/o drilling out the galley plugs. I also have an SR20DE-T in my garage that someone dropped off for repair with the same problem. Dumbass machine shops.

C

So does anybody have advice for cleaning up an aluminum oxide contaminated head? I might have gotten a little excited and purchased one as well. FM directed me to Michael Brayton Racing in Fullerton, CA for ultrasonic cleaning. He apparently has had good results in fixing these types of problems.

You're better off paying 575 to partsgroup for their complete '99 head. It hasn't been bead blasted. :)

yes indeedy. but how come Replika doesn't have that reputation for the other bajillion heads it does?

welcome to the world of passing the buck

Lost my head
 

Well, Keith sent me an e-mail to let me know that the head I bought on DotD was not a 99-00 head. It turned out to be a '94 head. Thank goodness somebody noticed before it shipped out. I was having them ship it straight to the cleaner.

They did apologize for the mix-up and offered me the head for the same price as the upgraded springs that were in it, but I had to pass. A worked '94 head probably flows the same as or slightly more than the stock '99 head I'm running now. Totally not worth aluminum oxide risk.

You got lucky then.

thus comes our newest smilie: :fm:

^ Bahahahahahaha

that's awful :bowdown:

more than you can afford, pal.