Porting a Lada 1600 SOHC head

[Alejoint]

Hello Guy and distinguished members of the GCRE forum:

This is my first post here so I'll try my best and make it a worthy one.

I know some of you might be thinking a race and competition forum is no place for discussing Ladas, but since they're built around Fiats I felt that I could find some answers to my questions here.

I took a couple pictures before sending my head to the engineering works hence I offer my apologies for the dirty looks. I'm planning on have the eng. works shave 0.8-1 mm off the head in order to increase the CR and do a wee bit of porting around the bowls myself. The only downside is that I live in a very small town, nobody has a flow bench in a 500 Km radius so there's no way for me to know if the porting job will improve things or not. Lada engines are very contained in the power and torque department so I'm keen to do anything I can -and that's without recurring to forced induction- in order to improve the overall output if even slightly.

I'm open to any ideas you may have, should any of you think there's still hope.

Thanks for reading;

EDIT: I apologize if this has been posted on the wrong forum.

[Guy Croft]

Good post Alejandro, and nicely presented, thanks.

To guide you I need well-lit photos of the ports from manifold face end, and the short-side radius region of inlet and ex, and the valves themselves. Never even seen a Lada head so we're all going to learn.

Practice the photography before posting, old ports with carbon are notoriously difficult to shoot.

And no, your well written post is not out of place here.

G

[Alejoint]

Hello Guy, and thanks for the reply.

Will take those pictures once I get the head back. My camera isn't very good at taking macro shots but I'll manage to borrow a better one.

Thanks again;