Cylinder Head Flow Benches (recent tuning threads)

[The Excession]

Given the recent contributions from our 'very own' (can I say that?) Pumaracing, and the appearance of Mr Vizard regarding porting cylinder heads, I'm utterly enthralled by the discussions and information that is being posted.

I'm no engine tuner, though I have rebuilt a couple of bike a car engines in my time, so with no disrespect to all the gentlemen involved...

It's like being aged 5 or 6 and sitting on Grandad's knee and him telling stories after a roast chicken dinner with Hovis bread where each slice was buttered and then all the butter was scraped off again ready for the next slice.

I would really like to know how you use and work with a flow bench.

I'm not looking for any trade secrets here, so to illustrate;

My background is in computer programming, and I remember a long long long time ago someone asking me 'How do you write HTML for a web site pages?'

I got all excited and started blabbing on about HTML, and the lad I was with stopped me and said 'No! You've not understood my question.... I can read all about HTML in a book, but how do you write and test it?'.

So I showed him Notepad, showed him some short cut keys for Internet Explorer and Windows and within a few days he was banging out HTML web pages.

Another time I insisted it was possible to write HTML without touching the computer's mouse and made that person work only using the keyboard. i.e. Change the document content, switch to the browser, view the changes, hop back to the document and change again - no mouse involed for copying, pasting, editing etc.

So, process over knowledge. I haven't got the knowledge (likely I never will), but I'm very interested in the process.

So my question is, how do you work day to day, hour to hour with a flow bench?

Obviously you hook up 'something' (a cylinder head), you make some measurements, then you might want to change something. Does that involve lugging a chunk of metal to the work bench and grinding stuff off and then testing and measuring it again?

If any of you would like to talk about computer models and fluid dynamic 'scenarios' even better, but what I'm really interested in is how you go from test 1 to results to engineering the input for test 2.

I'm quite fascinated by all of this!

[The Excession]

Thanks Pumaracing, very interesting stuff.

I suppose my next question would be instead of working on an actuall head which costs money if you mess it up, is there a possibility to work on a kind of mock up cast say using plaster of paris?

My other thought would be the use of these new fangled 3D printers where the 'final' port profile could be produced in plastic and tested with minimum labour.