I spent the weekend with a buddy porting the intakes on our TD heads.
Not a difficult task with the right equipment, although I'm not sure how
much performance difference we'll see. It was a good excuse to drink
some beers and swap jokes, anyway.
What was interesting was the difference in quality of the castings of our
two heads. Mine is an early "banana port" head; his a round hole later
type.
The casting on mine was a lot cleaner, with less "flash." The exhaust
and intake ports were squarer and the divider between the intake ports
was rounder and smoother.
Anyone else see these kind of differences in TD parts, particularly head
castings? My guess is that the casting quality deteriorated as
production figures mounted.
BTW, by "porting" I mean that we took a die grinder and cleaned up the
flashings, squared out the ports, and smoothed out the divider between
the intake ports to a teardrop shape, so that the air sees almost a knife
edge when entering the intake ports. In my friend's engine the divider
was almost square to the air. Certainly in his case cleaning up the
intakes was well worthwhile.
David Littlefield
Houston, TX
'62 MGA MkII
'51 MGTD
'88 Jaguar XJ-S
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