I was able to get the cylinder head swapped on Monday. I changed over to the spare ‘66 head I have that was supposedly rebuilt 2000 miles ago. In the process, I also made sure to change over the valve springs between the two heads so that my performance springs are on the head in the car.

It was pretty straight forward to do everything; it just took me awhile. I think I started around 11am and started it up about 9pm. The valve spring compressor I bought worked just fine too. While I had everything apart, I went ahead and repainted the new head since it was blue instead of black, and I also painted the exhaust manifold since I didn’t bother with that the first time I put it together. The head got Dupli-Color Gloss Black Engine Enamel, and I used VHT Flameproof Flat Aluminum on the exhaust manifold. The exhaust manifold definitely looks a lot better now.

Sadly, I don’t have much good news to report from the swap. It still has the vibration on the highway and higher rpms (though the highway vibration may be something else—looks like it’s doing it more even with it in neutral). I’m going to try to get a better idea of when it has the vibration here soon since I’m apparently a bit off-track. The engine doesn’t shake quite so badly at idle now, but still does some. I just performed a compression test though, and all of my cylinders are back where they should be—between 165 and 175 psi. So that’s good at least.

Finally, a note regarding the blog itself. I’ve been using WordPress running on my own server, and I’m most likely going to be switching it over to a different setup soon. I’ll be switching to something simpler. As a result, I’ll no longer have the option to send notifications when I make new posts, unless I come up with my own setup for it. I also very likely won’t have a comments system in place. Lastly, the site’s appearance will change drastically. Just wanted to give a heads-up on the changes.