Successfully whittling on cylinder heads requires a unique blending of art, science, and experience. Head porters are understandably secretive about their work, perhaps none more so than Livernois Motorsports' airflow guru, Rick Swain. We wanted to tell you all about the porting tricks he employed in carving up a set of PI Two-Valve heads to go along with the 5.0 short-block Livernois built for our 3g GT project, but Rick met that idea with all the enthusiasm of a moonshiner fielding questions from a revenuer.
Rick comes by his enigmatic nature out of necessity, as he spent seven years at Roush doing head development work for various Winston Cup and SCCA road-racing programs. In that game, you guard your secrets with all the intensity of a lion standing watch over fresh kill. Old habits die hard, and Rick quite rightfully had no desire to go public with all his aluminum carving secrets.
What that means is we're sort of limited in what we're able to show and tell you about Livernois' modular head-porting process, meaning you might find some of our captions even a bit more vague and minimalist than usual. For example, we can't show you what our heads' finished combustion chambers look like. That way, Livernois figures, if you want to try and copy them, you'll at least have to buy a set.
However, we will give you flow bench results, so that even though you won't know exactly how Livernois massages modular heads, you will know exactly how well that massaging works. You can judge for yourself the success of Rick's secretive head games before calling Livernois for details on pricing and applications.
Horse Sense: Unlike Ford's pushrod small-block heads where the exhaust side always needed the most attention, production modular Two-Valve heads--at least the PI versions--will likely see porters spending more time on the intake side of the equation.