Cylinder Heads, And the replacement thereof... Options

[Nozzle]

Well it looks like it's time for another rebuild on my engine and the current plan is to do a 2056 D-jet build based around the Raby 9590 cam kit from The Type IV Store. I wanted to get some prices for machine work to bring the heads up to snuff as they have well over 200K miles worth of heat cycles on them. So far it seems the costs range from $450 for a basic rebuild of the pair from Rimco to $2700 from The Type IV Store for their tasty 914 2.0 replacement RS+ heads. Needless to say that's quite a range and this is my first engine build so I'm unsure how to proceed.

Although I can stretch the budget for the RS heads, it just means the build will take much longer as that accounts for the lion's share of my original budget. So my question to the forum is, what would you do in my position and why?

Thanks,

John

[HAM Inc]

Speaking for my company the only way we were going to be able to remain a T4 based cylinder head company was to accept a lot of sub-par cores for service. I hate to see the T4 market go the way it has, but that's beyond my control. It's true that our new heads are the most expensive in the business. There's a reason for that and I don't need to go into that here.
The effort that's required to re-manufacture (not merely rebuild) a pair of old castings to achieve the level of quality we insist on was becoming more and more time consuming as the overall quality of cores steadily decreased.

8 years ago we stopped working with any used bus heads. A few years ago we stopped working with used 1.8 heads, then it was all used non "Q" 1.7's. Next the supply of good 1.7 "Q" heads dwindled and we stopped dealing with them. For the past 3 years the only used heads we have worked with were 2.0 914, and we would not accept any that didn't meet criteria outlined on my web-site. Over 75% didn't.
http://www.hamincgroup.com/blog/porsche/91...-service-policy

I am currently working a batch of 4 pairs used 2.0 914 heads. Each pair is totally virgin, never touched by another shop and are from customers willing to wait til we had enough for a production run. It took 6 months to get 4 pairs. That's not a winning formula for business growth. This will be the last batch of these that we do for the foreseeable future.

With our new plug and play 2.0 914 replacements, which we are doing the first production run of now for Raby turnkey engines, that will be the future of our T4 head work. Yes they are expensive, but they are superior to not only used heads, but any other T4 offering out there.