any idea on what it will cost for porting, polishing, new valve stem seals and a new head gasket on a 1.8T anyone?

just wondering like

the 20v turbo head is a very well deisgned head to start with! in many ways it's not dissimilar to the yamaha 5 valve motorcyle cylinder heads, having 3 inlet valves, and 2 exhaust valves on each cylinder..... because they are so good it is quite difficult to get any sort of gains out of porting work without spending a fortune on specialist porting work, also the frequent mistake people make is making the ports too big on, because they are working on the theory that big ports equals big flow numbers, in my experience, i've allways found that smaller ports give a much better turbo/throttle response...

my advice also is not to waste too much time polishing the intake ports either becuase this allows fuel vapour condensation on the port walls which can lead to fuel metering problems and genral rough running. the other common misconception made by many is making the exhaust ports match the size of the headers on the exhaust manifold by drawing round the gasket then grinding it out to match... having the 'lip' there discourages reversion and helps to reduce charge robbing... but to be fair, with the camshaft profiles you'll be running all these little pointers i've made are a little circumstantial and i doubt if you'll notice any difference at all with the standard oe cam profiles....

the one place you may pick up some power is by trying to equalize the flow in the manifold so that each cylinder is filled the same amount..it's surprising how much the flow to each cylinder can vary......

in regards to cost, i would say about £600 plus for the porting work alone (i certainly wouldn't touch one for less!) and a head gasket is about £40, plus you need a few other seals and gaskets too, plus a set of cylinder head bolts, you would also change the cambelt while you had it all apart too, the rest is labour...... 8-9 hours is my estimate

feck, i already had the cambelt done this year. might stick to just the selas for now

i do get hold of some decend ported 20v heads sometimes.... next time one comes along i'll let you know!

does depend on cost really but thanks mate

a mate of mine, who's mate runs a garage has suggested just getting a re-con head on exchange and changing the whole lot including vlaves etc. yet to get a pice on that though.

unless, there's a problem with your existing one ,it's not worth it...

however, if yours is burning oil a re-con one is a good investment