Question for auto shops / engine builders (and request for help)

[BBC69Camaro]

Originally Posted by Vegas69

Measuring and machining are two different ball games.

99% of auto techs are flat rate. Are they going to tear down a cylinder head that just had a valve job by a machine shop or is a brand new part. Very unlikely... They don't get paid to do that.

I'm talking real world here. Dealerships and small independent shops, not a hot rod shop.

I'm not talking about tearing down a head. Having done the machining yourself once I think you would know more about what you need to measure. Like on a head, run-out on the valve seats, whether the tip height is correct, how large the margin should be, and what kind of vacuum each cylinder can hold. True it is measurement but w/o having done any machining its harder to know how critical those measurements are or what measurements should be done.

A great example of this is a friend of mine had a cylinder head go out for machining due to a burnt valve. The machine shop completely screwed up the machining and the valve, and it was way too deep in the head. But did the tech installing the head catch it? No, even thou a simple visual check should have caught the error. Big waste of time on all fronts since the head was installed and had to be torn down again. I bet if that tech had ever done a valve job the chances of catching that error would have been much greater.