I'm looking at picking up a set of aluminum heads for my 350. I found a set for a reasonable price, BUT a bolt fell into the cylinder and bruised the cylinder head.
Is there any issue running them as is?
Pic of damage: 
I'm sure I could have a machine shop redo it, but that would put them back into the price ballpark of eBay heads, which have the correct centerbolt valve cover setup for my car.
These are still no-name heads too. they do come complete though.
I would call that a paperweight.
That could be fixed but whether that's worth it mostly depends on whether it NEEDS to be fixed. Lay a headgasket over it. If all that damage is inside the fire ring and does not cross it, it doesn't NEED to be fixed.
One thing i definitely would do is stand the head up and fill the ports with water. If that bolt dinged up the valve/seat interface, the water will drip past the closed valve.
Check the valves and seats for any dings and party on.
Some of that damage looks pretty severe especially the "V" area between the valves and the area below the spark plug. Taking a.030 to .060 fly cut across the head might remove a lot of the damage but don't know how it effect the valve to piston clearance or compression ratio. My gut feeling is you probably have some nice bookends. The 350 stuff is pretty inexpensive especially used that might be a better way to go. At a absolute minimum looks like valve seats probably needs to be machined.
Valves are probably hurt. I would anticipate breaking off the tulip. The head needs to be welded and resurfaced. I have run my share of junk. I would not run those as is in a performance application.
Those heads as they are would be good if I just wanted to finish Lemons, or I found it on the side of the road and had a junk engine missing a head and I wanted to see if it ran.
If you're building an actual useable engine, I would skip it.
They look like L98s? Casting number 113? If so, they weren't the sturdiest decks. Those dimples are a crack waiting to happen. You could cut the decks to get rid of the damage, but then they'll be thinner than safe, judging from the depth of them in the photo.
Pro tip: If you remove that exhaust valve in the damaged chamber, you can put a rope through the port to make a dandy anchor. 
If you really want to try them, triple check the valves (and seats in case whatever it was got in between the valve and seat). Then take a can of WD40 or PB blaster and a long flat file. Hold the file flat against the deck with minimal pressure and spend a vety long time just "polishing" all the high spots off. Don't press hard enough that you get aluminum filings on the file or the rag, you're just taking off high spots and old gasket material/carbon.
Looks like maybe someone used a super long spark plug and the piston broke it off? Those dents look like threads.
Vigo (Forum Supporter) said:That could be fixed but whether that's worth it mostly depends on whether it NEEDS to be fixed. Lay a headgasket over it. If all that damage is inside the fire ring and does not cross it, it doesn't NEED to be fixed.
One thing i definitely would do is stand the head up and fill the ports with water. If that bolt dinged up the valve/seat interface, the water will drip past the closed valve.
That is definitely inside the chamber. The fire ring would be a circumference that is about 0.125" inside the bolt holes, so that whole quench deck would be part of the chamber.
Care will need to be taken with compression ratio and octane. While he could normally run 87 octane at 9.5:1 with those heads, he's probably going to get hot spots and detonation at 9:1 or less with that damage.
That looks pretty rough, hard pass.
ok, passing on these.
Does anyone have any experience with the ebay $500 heads?
No direct experience, but they are the reason therapists get paid. Ok, not that bad, and they're getting better.
They are copies of a copy. Someone snagged a head, made a mold, and cast their own. If this were 1999, I would say forget it. These days I wonder if they're getting good enough. The big thing back then was core shift.
For $500, you can get chinese copies of a 113 casting which was first introduced in 1986 as an aluminum copy of a smog head. They are (by today's standards) awful heads. The most HP you could get from the factory with those heads was 215, but most came in a 170-195 hp configuration.
Or, for $700, you can get a brand new pair of the single best-flowing production heads GM ever made. Yes, they're iron. Yes they'll add 20 lbs. They're also a bolt-on 20+ hp, excellent detonation tolerance, highly efficient chambers, and have oodles of performance potential, unlike the aluminum offerings from Chevy. The best aluminum head chevy offered was the LT1 head, and it is way behind either the LT1 iron head or the Vortec.
The downside to the Vortec is that (while it is a bolt-on to the block) it requires a Vortec specific intake. If you're carbed, look to Marine junkyards. Mercruiser, Volvo, and OMC usually used a bronze-lined version of the ZZ4 intake on their Vortec marine 305 and 350. What looks like a black-painted useless intake for $50 in a junkyard is the same intake that sells for $400 new from GMPP on their 400hp crate engine. If you're EFI, just get an EFI intake to match it. Factory truck Vortec EFI had occasional "spider" injector issues, but if you find a Marine vortec EFI intake, it uses traditional external poppet injectors.
I'm TPI, which means only 1 intake option. We tried that on my brother's car and the one we had was warped so that added to the expense. The cost of the Vortec TPI base is $400. add that to the cost of the vortec heads $700, I'm already at the cost of a decent set of aftermarket heads. The ebay heads look to be vortec heads cast in aluminum but added the older intake bolt pattern to them.
How deep are the gouges and how much stock can be removed before you have to do a major re-do? (valves hit, lifters too long etc.)
If you decide these are cool paper weights, I would blue up the damage and then mill off material .010 at a time and see how she looks.
Dan
The vortec heads are a whole different animal on the intake side. There is no real dual-fit intake pattern as the Vortec intake ports are raised about 1/4". So if the ebay heads are really based on the Vortecs, your TPI intake ports will sit too low causing big mismatch problems. If the ports are standard SBC, then putting a Vortec intake on it would also cause a mismatch. That's a problem you'll always encounter with heads that are dual fit style. Find out where the ports are. If they are raised port like Vortecs, skip it because your TPI intake will not work well. If they're not raised port, then you can do it with a TPI intake, but they won't flow anywhere near Vortecs because a large part of their increased flow comes from the raised port. To be precise... if they're Vortec ports, they won't work. If they're traditional ports, they aren't Vortecs, nor will they flow much better than stock TPI heads.
So it's not just bolt pattern/configuration to be considered, it's where the ports are on those ebay heads. If you get them (which is a fine option if they'll work), definitely measure chamber cc. My guess is you'll be off by 5 or more cc from one end to the other. Another tip. Push the valves open and clean the seats and valve with solvent. Then use water with dishsoap to cc the heads. A trick they used to employ back in the day on those cheap heads was to coat the seats with a light grease so when customers cc'd the chambers they didn't have water dripping out the ports. They did that to mask poor valve work.
Like I said, they might be fine these days, but you get what you pay for. The last set I worked with was about the turn of the century and Chinese manufacturing is light years ahead of what it was.
914Driver said:How deep are the gouges and how much stock can be removed before you have to do a major re-do? (valves hit, lifters too long etc.)
If you decide these are cool paper weights, I would blue up the damage and then mill off material .010 at a time and see how she looks.
Dan
He can only do that twice. More than .020" off those decks will turn them into junk. Not to mention, unless he has a Sunnen in his garage, each cut will cost half as much as a new head.
Unless he has done major cam changes, piston/valve clearance is the least of his worries. The decks on those are pretty thin from the factory. Lifter height isn't an issue either. SBCs use locking rocker nuts to set lash on a hydraulic lifter, so they're adjustable.
I ended up sending them to the machine shop to be checked. They are redoing them because of 3 damaged valves, poorly installed valve stem seals, the obvious damage, weak as hell springs too. I'm still looking at under $500 for the heads investment. They came with 1.6 roller rockers as well. They are 205 intake runner heads. I found them marked with a part number S4400. They should be back from the machine shop this week after we figure out what cam I'll be running and match the valve springs to that.
I do need to start a build thread on this car.
oh, I checked the intake ports are in the regular SBC location not the raised vortec location.
Sounds like a winner.
In reply to Brian :
As a budget helper those are likely a lot better than many others although certainly not the best available. Even if you only break even you've provided work for a local machine shop and avoided wasting what you've already invested.
I had a set of Brodix 2.08 heads with damage like that on my 383 Vega when I bought it in the early 2000's. It still ran low 5's in the 8th, but never drove in on the street.
I still say run it.
come winter they'll be swapped on along with some other things. I'm not tearing into the engine until fall when it goes into storage.
plans are outlined in the build thread for the car.
I've only bought one set of cheap aluminum SBC heads and one of them actually wouldnt drop down on the dowel pins at all. I considered that a bad omen and returned them.
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