Low Cost, Effective Headwork!

Low Cost, Effective Headwork!

By Mike Kojima

My race in the inaugural MPTCC race ended with a bang in the practice before qualifying as my SR20VE decided not to cooperate in a big way.  Tearing down my engine afterward I found that one of the exhaust valves had lost its head.  Fortunately the valve head did not bounce around in the combustion chamber and cause more damage, probably because I had shut the engine off and pushed in the clutch the second I felt the power fall off.

The normally bulletproof Dog II ran strongly all day at the inaugural MPTCC race until it suddenly lost an exhaust valve with no warning at all.  This was a bummer because it was one of the fastest TU class cars.

I took the head over to my old friend Tom Fujita of Portflow Design to see if he could fix it.  The severed valve head had messed up the valve seat but the rest of the head looked to be ok.  Since the SR20VE is a JDM engine that does not have a lot of spare parts avalibe in the USA  I was hoping that Tom could get it back together.

We were having fun with Dai Yoshihara and Joon Maeng, half a lap later Joon was on fire and we had a dead engine.  Real bummer.

Tom suggested while the head was apart that I let him clean up the ports a little and to do a good radius valve job.  Although I didn't need to make any more power for the MPTCC TU class, I thought that cleaning up the head would make a nice tech article.

Ugh.