Cost to bench flow heads - NJFBOA - Home of New Jersey's Camaros and Firebirds

3.4 grape of wrath · 04-06-2009, 09:19 AM

Does anyone know the cost to bench flow a set of heads? I just got done porting and polishing the heads and would like to see If there were any improvments.
The heads are off of a 3.4 liter v6 and are identical so I was only going to have one of them checked. What do you think they would charge?

Blacdout96 · 04-09-2009, 11:37 PM

Actually, it's alot. Alot of machinests I talk to cannot afford to do that for customers. Major shops and companies can afford that because they can afford CNC machines to duplicate flow numbers. You can do some at home tricks, but for the most part, its a guessing game, that's why people hesitate to port their own heads, because if the flows aren't duplicated, you can do more bad then good.

camaroAL · 04-14-2009, 10:24 PM

you would have needed the head benched before porting, and then after. and it would have been nice to also have had the same place do both. its hard, especially this time of the season for engine builders to set aside high $ work to flow a head for an over the counter customer. its not that they are not going to want to do it, there is just not a lot of free downtime for things like that.

1QWIKBIRD · 04-14-2009, 10:41 PM

If its just for a curiosity thing, save the money. As others have stated, you really need to have before and after done, to know where you are going and should have all the ports done to see if they are uniform. To have just one intake and one exhaust done isn't going to yield a whole lot of useful data.

That said, I had my heads in for service about two years ago and was curious to what my heads flowed because they previously had some port work done by a reputable shop and I was curious what kind of flow was picked up. I don't know what I paid for for flow bench time, but the total bill was just over $300+/-. That included disassembling both heads, checking all the springs, cleaning up a few valve tips, cleaning the chambers/ports, flowing one intake and one exhaust and reassembly.

I'd guess if the head is stripped and clean and ready for the flow bench $100 minimum if you just walk in off the street? But I am just guessing......

Chris