A couple of Porting questions.

It depends on the heads you are having ported and polished, and your goals for the car. If you are talking about stock heads I would estimate around $400 to get them P&P and a valve job. If you go into the CNC processes I would say it's too expensive to do on a stock head. However you can do the job yourself if you have the tools. An air compressor and die grinder is a must for the best results. then you will have to invest in some bits to cut then sanding drums to polish the heads. If you have the stuff to do it with then give it a try, but I wouldn't try to port a set of AFR's my first time out. That could turn into a costly mistake.

I had AFM do my lower intake simply b/c they flow tested it once they were done to make sure each runner was as close as possible. It cost $200 to have my lower matched to a 1250. The process is a simple one that just involves grinding away the excess alumimum or steel.

Don't waste you money having someone port your stock heads though. They will probably charge at least $400 to do it and for $600 more you could buy a set of aftermarket heads that will outflow your ported stock heads by a TON.

There is port matching and gasket matching.

Gasket matching is stupid.

To properly port match, get a couple of big sheets of paper gasket material. Make 4 intake gaskets, but don't cut the intake port holes, just get the shape right and the bolt holes. Now put one gasket on a cylinder head and use an exacto knife to cut the intake port from the inside. Now you have an expact copy of the intake port of the head. Take your second gasket and do the same for the intake, then line up the gaskets by the holes, or the bottom edge and you can see the difference between the ports on your heads and your intake.

There has to be 50 ways to lay out the changes you need to make, but here is a fairly simple one. Spray the intake to head surfaces with blue dyechem, then take the gasket you made on the intake and put it on your head. Use a scribe to mark all of the material that you can see through the gasket hole. In some cases you won't see anything.

Next do the opposite with the gasket you made from the head and the intake manifold.

Now you know where the interference is. Just remove the material to the scribed lines, and taper the transition in to the ports.

Repeat this process for both sides, and make sure that you are matching up the correct head with the correct side of the intake, but since ford heads bolt to either side, this only matters if you are not removing the heads.

Now, advanced port matching. You want to have the whole port smooth, with a gentle taper from the throttle body to the valve bowl in the head.

It's a good idea to see the angle that the intake port makes with the gasket surface. If the angle for the cylinder head + the angle of the intake manifold = 180 degrees, the transition from the intake to head is flat and no work is needed. Check all four sides of the port.

Now for the taper. Usually you have to remove most of the material from the intake, so you can screw up the taper there. You have to blend in the areas that you removed as far in to the runner as you can. Just make sure you are not moving the problem from one place to another.

A port and polish can be several different things. To some people, you remove any bumps and give the port surface a mirror finish. To others, you use a flow bench to determine the best port shape, then enlarge that shape untill you are almost about to break through the casting, then you work the combustion chambers, polish everything, coat the ports, the chamber, and the exterior of the heads.

Most port and polish jobs are in between, but usually closer to the first type.

For the inexperienced home porter, the first type is safer and easier than trying to get huge flow without a flow bench.

For stock heads, it usually costs more to get your heads to flow like $1,000 aluminum heads, than to buy $1,000 aluminum heads. So DIY head porting is perfect here as long as you get the heads cheap and don't mind if they turn in to junk.

If you want more flow than that, it makes more sense to buy new heads, and if they are not enough, trade them out for better heads untill you have the best available, then have them professionally ported.

It just seems silly to me to spend $1,000 making twisted wedge heads flow like track heats.