I wanted to ask you guys' opinion of after market heads. I'm more interested in the aluminum castings that ZZP offer, that take advantage of larger valves, more so than stage port jobs from a company like Intense Racing. Are they worth anywhere near the hefty price tag?

 

I think those are for if you plan on making extreme boost or raising compression.. Worth the price? Thats arguable but I would say no unless youve done a ton of other stuff..

Im sure someone else will be on here to give you a better answer however..

 

I haven't bought any aftermarket heads, but if they perform as well as my stock heads that were ported, it's definitely worth it. I'll say this - I had 9-10* of KR and the next mod I did was have the heads ported and I went down to 1* of KR.

 

That's intresting, I didn't know it would lower knock that drastically. I thought almost the only gain was airflow. How extensive was the port job, just gasket matched and smoothed? DIY or shop?

 

Only 2 ways I'd go with those heads
-If you were building an all out 3800 for the max possible power. No budget, no limits.
-If you had so much money you didn't know what to do with it and just wanted the most blingy parts you can get.


$4k is an awful lot of money to spend on ported heads, especially when ported stock heads have been proven to exceed 600 whp. No question, these can be pushed even further, but how far are you really looking to go?

Just to make sure you're keeping a tally on this - if you get a full rebuild plus all these high end parts plus the fully built trans you'll need, you're probably talking a $25k build here (maybe x2 if you plan to do the same on both engines). Heck, there's $10k just between these heads and the turbo kit.

 

Curious how much you spent to have them ported?

To the OP - Porting heads certainly has advantages, but IMO a local speed shop can get 70 or 80% of the benefit for maybe $1k. Stage heads from a seasoned 3800 vendor can get every last drop, but for double the cost. Certainly the ported aluminum can get even more, but at 4x the cost and nowhere near 4x the benefit. Its greatly diminishing returns at that point.

 

A guy I met from ClubGP that lived in my area had a CSC 3800 Monte, and he had ported his own heads with good results. I'm pretty sure my heads are as close to being maxed out as possible. Seriously, I was running a 3.4 pulley with boatloads of KR - even with race gas I'd get 1-3 degrees of KR. Ported heads reduced KR the absolute most out of any mod I did at that point... Since then I've dropped to a 3.1 pulley and added a FSIC, getting 1-3 degrees of KR, but I just added headers, so we'll see what happens.

$200, because it took him longer than he expected. Of course I took the engine apart and just brought him the heads, then I put everything back together.

 

I just looked at intense racing's stage four heads, and I didn't know this, but they actually come with larger valves as well. I thought they were just a CNC port job. Now I definitely don't think ZZP's heads are worth it. They're ~2000$ more than the stage 4's, all for an aluminum casting and .06" more intake valve. The stage 4's also come with 130lbs springs and retainers.

 

That is an absolute steal no matter how long it took!

 

I'll probably port my own heads, and if/when I get into serious racing, I might invest in stage 4 heads.