Time for an update...
I had a little meet here this weekend with some CRX Community guys I know. It was a long one, and among a few other projects I got the engine finished and installed between friday and sunday. I ended up not using the bearings, I couldn't get them smooth where I drilled them, so I didn't want to take any chances... oh well, there will be other builds (I have 4 A6 heads now...).
P&P on the Y8 head was pretty straightforward and didn't take too much time, but it's pretty tiring work. I used a cutting bit to remove material only around the valve seats, to make a smooth transition between the port and seat, it's impossible to feel it. I used a sanding bit for the whole port, I think it's about 80 grit, and polished the outer part before the divider with a plastic sponge-type porting bit I got from a freind. The bosses for the valve guides were also smoothed out. The exhaust side was cake, less space in there and a little harder to work with, but once I cleaned out the carbon it was easy to get everything really smooth. I only got a couple of pics of the ports, the camera guy arrived a little late.
Here I am porting the head, Vlad stopped by and chilled for a bit in the morning:
A couple shots of the intake ports when the engine was put on the stand:
I ended up painting the block semi-gloss black, and I think it came out pretty nice. I painted the back at the last minute, since I wasn't planning on doing the back I didn't sandblast it as evenly. Still have to go through and sand/brush the "D16A6" plaque and some other stuff... paint the header (again), maybe clean the head up more, and I'd like to swap my tranny or paint the case to match the block. I'm going for black with brushed/polished accents, and a little red here and there (cam gear, plug wires). I'm going to take off the intake mani and port it, and repaint it soon. The AEM intake is coming off soon too so I can weld up the holes in it and paint it black, it's getting a bit beat up in there, I'm waiting on a new AEM sticker for it. I also want to sandblast and repaint the mounts, or use one of my extra sets... I really like the ESpeed D series mounts but it's hard to justify the cost of something like that.
Anyway, here is the block after paint:
