H22 Swap Part 2
Headwork

By Keith Buglewicz
Photography: Keith Buglewicz

In our second installment of our H22 to Civic project, we quite simply ran out of room when it came time to get into the head work done on the car. But, that's why Al Gore invented the Internet.

We sent our head to PURE in Toledo, Ohio for the head job. The first step was soaking it in cleaning solution. This wasn't a high-mileage engine, but after several thousand miles, oil inevitably bakes itself onto the aluminum. It takes time to clean it up to the point where one can even see what needs to be done. Once clean, it was obvious that the head was in pretty good shape overall. However, this wasn't to be an extreme head build up. Instead the technicians at PURE decided that the best thing to do was a pocket-port job, basically cleaning up the rough edges in the ports, smoothing them out, and removing any possible areas for hotspots in the combustion chamber. A lot more could be done, of course. Bigger intake and exhaust ports, reshaped ports, reconfigured combustion chambers with more quench area...the list goes on and on.

But make no mistake. Just because the ambitions on this particular head job are not quite as high as those for a race head, there's still plenty of work to do. And all of it is done by hand. Head porting is art as much as science, and experience counts as much as machinery. In other words, it's much more than just taking a grinder to aluminum. Let the pros handle this.

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