In my garage i have a set of small valve "c" cast iron heads for an olds 455 big block. these came off a running car and had no issues.

the other day i accidentally knocked one of the heads over onto my concrete garage floor (they were standing upright and side by side) the head fell on its bottom (valves down like if it were on the engine)

so my question is....

is the head cracked or any damage with the fall? i looked at the head and see no issues but didnt know if there was something i was not seeing....

 

You might have crushed a bug under it, but probably did not damage the head.

 

Spend a few bucks and have em mag'd

 

So the surface that seals against the head gasket fell down on the rough, abrasive concrete floor?

What could possibly have gone wrong?

 

I've done this once or twice before.

My solution:

Grab some old storm window glass, and a can of 3m 90 glue.

Glue some sandpaper to the glass, tie a short length of rope on both sides of the head, and pull it back and forth a hundred times to take down the damage.

 

there is not any visible damage, the head just fell over, my concrete floor has a smooth pour and it is a nice level surface. i just stood the head back up and have wondered if there is any chance it could have been damaged by the fall...

 

Or maybe stop storing them like that.....

 

You can check them by running a long straight edge over the surface.

 

If they were already on the floor, and just fell over I would bet they are fine. If they fell off a workbench to the floor then I might be really concerned.

If there is any doubt, a inspection and magnaflux would be cheap piece of mind.

 

It's fine. You just hillbilly magnafluxed it, lol.

 

This just put some Roadrunner scene into my head of a stink bug roaming across the floor. Replace the stink bug with Wile E. Coyote, and a large, Acme branded safe, you get the idea.

The head may or may not be damaged, as we cannot see, or handle it, we cannot say for certain.

 

The sealing surface could have been damaged by contacting a hard or abrasive surface, as Joe said, but I wouldn't worry otherwise.

- Eric

 

Doesn't everyone know? You have to treat heads like cranks ..... Right Chris?

 

I know here it's been cold at night 17 degrees. With those kind of temps wouldn't the cast be a bit brittle ? That would be my only concern. I have how ever dropped a cylinder head from a 4 foot tall bench F-d it all up. Luckily it was a chevy .

 

I'll bet it probably happened many times when they where building the engines at the manufacture..if you dinged a chamber the most damage you'll have is gained a half horsepower..

 

You're having 'em resurfaced before use anyhow, right?

Yeah, pretty sure that, like cranks, you cannot store heads on end for fear they will get shorter due to the effects of gravity.

 

Chris, is it worse for them to get shorter on end or bend from laying down?

 

Well, shorter is easy to undo by hanging from the one end. Of course you have to hang from each end, alternately, to properly spread out the stretch.

 

But, which end would you hang it from?

 

Duh, that depends on which end it was stored on.
Think about it.
A crank standing on the aft end has almost all the weight on the aft end, but very little on the snout. So, to properly stretch it, you would hang it by the aft end...

If you hung it by the snout, the snout would stretch more due to the larger weight imposed on that end than say the aft end has affecting it.... combine that with the less snout shrinkage from the sitting-on-aft-end storage, and you have fubar'd that crank.

Or, head.

:-)

 

What was I thinkin...