Bench in my basement - came with the house
Air Compressor - Moved into basement for this task only. It usually lives in the garage. It's got 0w30 506.01 Elf Evolution CRV in it - starts up just fine at 0F
.
More than enough compressor for this and relatively quiet. $400 about 5 years ago on sale at Sears.
Right angle die grinder and carbide burr set.
Snap-On PT210 - I've used cheap $20 die grinders and for a lot of jobs they're just fine, but for something like this or head porting I like more control. This is a 1/2 HP 22,000 RPM and has plenty of torque to run at not full throttle and pull through, nice and linear power delivery with more "throttle" without being on/off like the cheap ones.
The double cut carbide burr set is from McMaster Carr (
4308A31 16pc $209). The only ones I really used are the ones that are in the grinder and on the table. 1/2" diameter 1" long cylinder with radius end $25 (in grinder) and the 1/2" diameter 1-1/8" long 14 degree taper radius end $24 (on table).
These burrs work just fine on aluminum with just a little of this "cutting wax" also from McMaster (
1379K63 $10.83). A full stick will last a lifetime - I didn't use a thimble full (literally) doing all of the cylinder head.
I bought a sanding roll kit from McMaster (
4690A91 $70) and some 6" long arbors but really didn't use them much nor would I recommend them. It's nice for cleaning up some rough areas, but it's really only visual.
The 1" cylindrical flap disk sanding drum is very handy, particularly for cleaning up after the die grinder in the aluminum head ports. The one I got below (right below the box with blue flaps) sucks and didn't last more than 5 minutes. Get this one instead from McMaster (
3393A111)
With the above tools it comes down to patience and perserverence (sp?). Take your time and don't try to rush it. Use your fingers and get the port to "feel" the shape you want - it's like hand/eye coordination, but it's really finger/visualization - you have to be able to "see" with your fingers as you run them in/out of the ports to know where to remove material to get it to feel the way you want. Do one port at a time so you have a un-touched reference to see how far you're going and compare ports often. Once you have two ports done, compare them to each other and make them the same as best as you can feel (don't worry about how it looks, but how it feels), continue until they're all done. For ports that are "mirrored" (1 & 2 Exhaust vs 3 & 4 Exhaust), use your left and right hands at the same time in the ports to compare - so that when one port turns in, so does the other but in the other direction.
I don't claim to know much of anything about this - I don't have a flow bench or anything to quantify what I'm doing or even to see if I'm making things better or worse. I'm just doing what seems right to me - Questions, comments and suggestions are very welcomed