this is for a customer who wants some strength added in the water jackets for his tt bmw setup. i've only done two ports so far, i need to get some thicker filler wire. i'll post up pics of the finished head later.

the head, dirty as hell...


area to be welded before cleaning.


after some cleanup grinding with a small carbide burr.


welded up.

 

Looks good

Ive welded a few M20 heads myself. Definately a good way of keeping the headgasket in place. Those coolant jackets get DIRTY lol.

 

so these heads are prone to cracking? one would think German engineers were smarter than that!!

looks good

 

The combustion chambers shift around a bit under high boost and they push the headgasket quite easily. This stabilizes everything. Some M20 heads are prone to cracking around the cam journals but there really isnt a fix for that one. They can make some suprising power for a 12 valve head with some boost.

 

Looks good

 

all done:

 

Why not just O ring the block?

 

wow looks great

sorry for a n00b question but what exactly does that do?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by k20 jon &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">The combustion chambers shift around a bit under high boost and they push the headgasket quite easily. This stabilizes everything. Some M20 heads are prone to cracking around the cam journals but there really isnt a fix for that one. They can make some suprising power for a 12 valve head with some boost.</TD></TR></TABLE><TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by V8MeatHead. &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">wow looks great

sorry for a n00b question but what exactly does that do?</TD></TR></TABLE>


answer to your question

 

looks good. what kind of welding setup did you use? did you pre-heat the head?

 

Did you even clean the head or like hot tank it before the welding?

 

dude he did better than hot tanking, he ground into the head to find some clean material.

hot tanking a head and then thinking you can just weld it al heads will 'bleed' out a buch of oil and crap when you heat it up from welding, etc. It's best to grind it down and find new material to work with.

 

arent u worried about the vavle seats popping out!?!??!?!?! I hope its getting the seats replaced if not at least checked.

 

how many amps were you welding at? and what rod. it looks a little hot.

 

i didn't pre-heat the head, just warmed up the area i was welding a bit with the torch. the head as a whole didn't get extremely hot enough to worry about the valve seats. it still bled out some oil... made it lots of fun to weld.

setup:
miller 180sd
150amps
3/32" green tungsten
5356 1/8" filler
15-17cfm argon flow

spoke to the customer when he picked it up... this area of the head is where there isn't a lot of seal off area for the head gasket and therefore, tends to blow the gasket out in this area. doing this modification will not affect coolant flow. it is a head off a b25.

 

So back to my question at hand why not O ring the block or cylinder head? Or does knowone know what the hell Im talking about?

 

I agree with the o-ringing the block. But after thinking about it, it was probably cheaper to have him weld the head up, than to send the block to a machine shop and have it o-ringed...
Kyle

 

yup, its alot easier to simply take your head off and bring it to the welder/machine shop than either bringing the whole car and trying to do it in-vehicle or taking the motor apart. Its a functional fix to keeping the headgasket in place. O-ringing works just as well if not better but sometimes the logistics dont work out.