Top End Pt.1

The best part about old iron, aluminum and steel is that you get to work with old fashioned methods and a whole lot of fire.  Case in point: valves.  After all these years, the best material for valve guides is bronze.  You're using a torch to super heat metal to get the old guides out, and new guides in, you're tooling away with brass shavings falling by the wayside, doing things by feel with hand tools...  It's transcendent of time.

This week, we reamed the valve guides to perfection, then added a few sexy bevels to induce oil flow.  It's all about the sexy bevels.  Sadly, the exhaust valves didn't seat very well, so the top end had to go back in to the machine shop for a valve job.  And that's as far as we could go on that.

Also, I picked up the cylinder from the stripper, and dropped that off to be bored out as well, so I'll have everything ready to rock next week.  Hopefully.

So, there were only baby steps happening, but we're inching ever closer to having something assembled.  If there's any question about the cro-magnon, guttural awesomeness to working on vintage iron, look at this top end again, and tell me it doesn't look like a caveman's skull: