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Cylinder Head Dilemma.


volvolove

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Traditionally, turbo heads have sodium-filled exhaust valves to handle the heat associated with turbos. Also the cam timing, when set to the marks on the NA head, will cause the car to underperform due to valve overlap. A quick and dirty fix to the latter might just be bolting on your old cam sprockets?

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Valve guides are cheap. If you don't mind doing a bit of work, you can replace them. As for the cam timing of the NA engines, not a problem, there's about 15º of adjustment allowed by the stock cam gears, just advance the exhaust to reduce the overlap until it drives how you like it. :tup:

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Just replace the guides and valve stem seals. FCP sells guides for $8 and stem seals $1. My local machine shop charges $5 per guide for installation. Since you have the head off replace guides, seals, valve job and surface as necessary. The performance and reliability improvement will be worth the small investment.

AF

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  • 3 weeks later...

For posterity I have reassmbled the engine. I've been a volvo tech for 7 years and have only seen 1 cylinder head on a newer car that actually needed valve guides, so I decided to put new seals and clean it all up, lap the valves and put it back together. The car runs great and burns no oil and runs stronger than ever because I replaced the plugs with NGK iridium and also cleaned out the ports when the head was apart (which were totally filthy). Just thought I'd let the community know all is well with this case. Valve guides were just a bit out of spec and they're fine with new seals installed! Thanks for your input and thoughts!

Steve.

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