96 Gt Pi Head Swap - Help!

GOAT44 said:

Thank you for all the help! One last question...

Has anyone had any experience with Modular Head Shop (Nick @ MHS)? Degreeing the cams might be a little above my ability and this shop's name comes up a lot on here with their ability to degree cams. What would be needed for this shop to degree my cams? Would I have to send the heads,cams ect or just cams? Apologize if questions are redundant but just learning.

Click to expand...

They need the cams and your cam gears, or you can pay extra to get another set from him if you want to keep your car running in the mean time. Regardless, the cams and cam gears have to stay matched up in order to be accurate.

He has a test motor setup that supposedly closely resembles most production motors (like in your car) with the full bottom end, heads, valves, springs, lifters, etc. except the cams. He takes the cams and gears you send him, and installs them straight up, which is the dot-to-dot method with the chains. Then he'll go through all the motions with a degree wheel, dial indicator, etc. all that jazz to find out where the actual intake centerline is located. You take the difference between that number and the recommended intake centerline, and that's your offset. For example, your 262s have a recommended ICL of 109 degrees; let's say he checks them and finds them to actually be 113 degrees when installed straight up on a particular set of cam gears. So to install them on the correct ICL, you as the end user need to advance them 4 degrees to get from 113 to 109. Make sense? Because cam gears and cams can vary individually, this number may be different on each bank.

You do this with the Trickflow adjustable crank gears. They're pretty darn easy to use, and used to be fairly cheap (~$40). Not sure what they are now.

I don't know this for fact, so I'm assuming this: Nick is very knowledgeable about these things, and he may recommend something different than what the cam manufacturer recommends (since he's degreeing someone else's cams, and not his own). I know I've read before on forums where he's found that some aftermarket cams don't have enough PTV clearance even when installed correctly. So for example, he may know that a 109 ICL on your 262s is too tight, too loose, or just right, and make a recommendation to advance or retard them to a certain number based on his experience.

Regardless of which way you do it, it's worthwhile to do it right and get them degreed in. As I mentioned earlier, mine were retarded 6 degrees from what they were supposed to be; if yours were retarded to a 115 ICL instead of the recommended 109, you would certainly be leaving significant power on the table. Or, on the other side, if they were advanced to 103 degrees, you'd be pulling the heads back off to fix the bent and broken valves.

I'm not sure about now, but when I did it several years ago, it was a decent bit cheaper to pay him to do it than it was to just get the tools I needed to do it myself, not to mention all the extra time required. But that's up to you. It's actually not all that hard to do once you have the required tools, but it does take some decent time. Probably 2-4 hours per side for a newbie.

Since this post has already turned into a novel, I'll use it to throw out my little plug for MHS. If you do much reading around online, you'll find Nick to be one of the smartest people to ever work on these mod motors, or at least one of the smartest willing to share that info with the rest of us. He absolutely knows what he's talking about, and is one of the best in the business for putting out good products without all the marketing hype. If you're not already aware, Nick sold MHS to Excessive Motorsports a year or two back. Don't let that deter you; he is still there doing head work and consulting and all that, just not the business side of things. However, Jordan (owner of Excessive) is an extremely straightforward and good guy to deal with. I bought a good number of things from them for my motor build (still ongoing), and the customer service was excellent. I had an issue where some parts I ordered hadn't come in after about a week, which was unusual since they normally ship on the same day and it gets to me within the next two. So I called up the number at about 10 p.m. on a Friday night intending to leave a message, only to be surprised by Jordan picking up the phone. He knew who I was and what I was calling about as soon as I told him my name. He explained that they were having supplier issues with the parts I had ordered, offered to switch me to a different brand of the same part (which was actually more expensive) for no charge, and had them boxed up and sent out that night. I was on the phone for less than 2 minutes and the situation was resolved.

Bottom line: no issues when dealing with MHS or Excessive.