07 1500 2wd QC 5.7.
I have some money burning a hole in my pocket but i do want to spend it reasonably. Looking at heads online for 1500-3000K has me really wondering if they are really worth it. I am wanting to rebuild my heads anyway so I can put a decent cam in. Are the gains for a CNC ported head that much better than a job done by hand at a shop that is just ok at porting. Also what kind of $ difference that would be getting a complete ready to bolt on vs having a local race machine shop do the work. Anybody had experience with either? Current upgrades are headers, no cats, catback, intake and programmer putting down 300 to the wheel.

 

Hand porting can be more expensive because it takes many man hours. Take the time and talk to your local machine shop. The cam needs to be matched to the heads and compression ratio. If your talking about a mild, off the shelf upgrade cam, keep the stock heads. Ported heads are for when you want to move a serious amount of air, like 7000 rpms or a 392 cid stroker set up.

 

That's what I was wondering. I have a spare set of heads that need redone anyway that I could have used for cores or just do a little touching up of the ports and upgrade the valve guide, valves, springs, retainers etc. And yes just an off the shelf mild/medium cam. Trying to set limits as I want to do upgrades but not pointless over the top projects. I have all the internals from a 6.1 that I got really cheap that I may do something with but was disappointing to find that I couldn't reliably bore the 5.7 block that much.