it's really about the old saying ,you pay for what you get .
there are a lot of misconceptions about head porting on diesels , its hardened iron that has, unless it’s a new head casting , been heat cycle hardened. It wears out a little over a hundred dollars worth of carbides, and fifty dollars worth of abrasive rolls to polish it all .
The average ported head has 40+ hours worth of times with a grinder , not counting the machine work and valve job. And the amount of material removed is over 10 lbs, not counting the intake that is sawed off.
Extrude hone only goes to abrade the path of least resistant’s , and most of the time will remove the areas that produce very little gains, in a boosted engine , and some times hurting the flow numbers .
The finished results will make you feel really good , and look like a smooth work of art , but when it comes to doing it right , porting is just hard gritty work with a grinder.
As far as a gas heads costing less , you can buy a set of Big block Chevy Profiler heads, now in Summit or Jegs that would embarrass Pro Stock teams of ten years ago , and they are almost as cast. These killer heads cost about 10 cents of the dollar of what they would have cost 10 years ago. . The reason is, they sell hundreds of thousands of big block Chevy heads each years
The diesel market is still painfully small in the big picture. Hence places like Profiler, Indy cylinder head , Dart , and Brodix come out with a hundred or so ,new heads , including cast irons each years , but to date not one diesel head is in the works with the exception of possibly a Dmax head .
Some day possibly , but not today. The Dmax head has a chance because the marine industry and the main stream Hot Rodder is looking hard at the Dmax as a viable engine in cars and boats.
To anyone that offers a cheap port job, that exactly what you will get .
