<VV> My dropped valve seat

[tony underwood]

I know this is an older thread but I thought I'd comment, re- damaged 
heads/seats:


I had a '63 Spyder head that had lost an exhaust seat that was given to 
me after the previous owner drove it for a couple of hours in order to 
get the car home.  The head was a mess.  The seat didn't break (unlike 
140hp 'Vair seats when They fall out) but it had wallowed out the seat 
pocket so badly that it had left behind nothing that could have been 
called a seat pocket, more like a soup bowl.  On a lark, I took it to a 
local machine shop that had experience with aluminum heads.  He welded 
up the head to replace all the missing meat in that chamber and recut 
the pocket for the replacement seat (which he had on-hand and it was a 
deeper seat) and since he was "already there" he pulled the existing 
factory intake valve seat out and recut that pocket and installed a 
deeper intake valve seat and then did a "quickie" valve job just to 
"clean things up".   The price was very reasonable (and I say that as 
being a poor almost-ready-to-graduate college student at the time) since 
he was a one-man operation and never turned down any work and kept busy 
underbidding other shops around town in order to keep the workflow up.   
I ended up using the head later on, worked fine, still had the other 
factory seats in place when I traded the engine out for something else 
(a 140hp out of a '66 Corsa) that went into my red ragtop.


Like Frank said, it's pretty hard to ruin a Corvair cylinder head to the 
point that it's not worth repairing.   You just need to shop the job 
around and find a competent guy willing to do the work without calling 
it a "specialty car" job and trying to get you to provide his next 4 car 
payments.


tony..



On 10/21/2024 10:49 PM, corvairduval via VirtualVairs wrote:
>   I know it is not the fastest way, but I would not say your heads are unrepairable until a Corvair head person says so. Such as Ken Hand, Tom Knoblouch (americanflat6.com), Steve Goodman, etc.  I've had heads fixed where the seat was not touching ANY aluminum from being beat to death after falling out.
> If you are just buying a set a used heads that have original seats, or seats replaced by a local machine shop, then you need to send these heads to the above types of Corvair head guys to get seats installed that might actually stay in place while you drive it. Others on here might have more people to choose from. Driving on 50+ year old seats that have had lots of heat cycles is a crap shoot. Sure I do it, drive old engines, but if I am putting money into a new engine I do not trust old valve seats!

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