Enlarging coolant waterways in a K-Series head.

One for those of you with your cylinder head off already and are wondering what you can do whilst you have access.

The stock K-Series head is a pretty poor cast and not very well finished unfortunatley, the VVC heads were much better and even them can do with a bit of a tidy up. Inadequete cooling is usually the root cause of most of our problems, so anything we can do to aid this process is only going to help with the longevity of our engines.

As can be seen in this picture you are meant to have 2 triangular waterways, these can often still be partially blocked with metal causing a restriction in the flow of coolant around the areas where you would want it to be flowing at it quickest.



These are the tools I used, just a small drill piece and used the side of the drill to gradually enlarge the waterways. I could do with getting a small file to finish it off but as of this time I dont have one in my posession.



The results.







The waterway at the ends gets very restricted as its only half the size of all the rest, so in some bad cases flow here can be as little as a quarter of what it is in around other cylinders. Its worth paying particular attention to this waterway.

I'm interested to see what the results will be once it's all up and running again. I know how restrictive 'bottlenecks' can be in a watercooled PC and I can't see it doing any harm removing them from an engine. Unless somebody knows different? Great idea as far as I can tell Daz. :broon:

Decided to do it after reading this:
http://www.dvapower.co.uk/
Scroll down to or click on "Water way modifications".

Its a 10 min job to do them all, I've yet to see if the cylinder head is hard enough to go back on or if its scrap but nothing else to do today.

Hi Jan...

These pics show the poor manufacturing of the water ways through the head.. These will be cleaned out to allow water to flow faster through the head when the rest of the head work is done this week..

The head is at the top of the engine and its the bit that the spark plugs screw into..

The head is being converted to NON VVC

No idea why the pics have come out twice... sorry

Remember the vvc cam is larger than the exhaust cam

Great work.

I think that your pics are too big as I can't see the edit button which is usually at the bottom right.

it was a double image tags stopping the forum from resizing.

"Those who can’t do, teach." No longer applies. Clearly, you can do... and a damn good job too DD. :broon:

I'm rubbish with computers..

At my college we don't have computers.. We have etch-a-sketch.. When something goes wrong we call technical support and they come down and shake it..

Thank you Psymon for fixing it

I think I understand now DD, Thanks babe :yesnod: