service life of Brodix heads

[Dragsinger]

I have a set of Brodix Track 1 heads that have been fully work and have run very well for many years. They are fast and consistent. They are also at least 25 years old, maybe more and have been repaired once when a rod broke and damaged a chamber. [this happened several seasons ago] Lately, they developed a coolant leak around #8 exhaust seat. [I do not remember if this was the chamber damaged years ago.] They also have all Titanium valves and 5/16 stems, so they were top shelf when new.
The question, have they come to the end of a reasonable service life? Is it worth a repair?

[Dave B]

Were they re heat treated after repair? i take you had them welded up? Allot of guys cut seats out on leaking hole or cyl. Then if crack is visible do light weld repair. Then recut and do new seats there. You get seats out sometimes hitting that area with glassbeader kind of opens up crack area to make it visible. We used to have heads we couldnt duplicate because of hrs involved. If seat was not moving or loose we just fought the leak with moroso plasma seal and dumped water level low enough so not in heads when sitting for much time.

[Dragsinger]

I do not know the process used for the former repair. I was done by a former employee of Brodix who opened his own shop, so I suppose he was up to speed about the process. The repair was successful for several seasons. It is a good set of heads and if the seat leak can be satisfactory repair I would like to run them again.

As of just now, Brodix is not taking any new repair work.

Do y'all have a suggestion where to send them?

[Dave B]

The biggest fear i would have is seat moving. If you lap that valve really well , and its hitting evenly on seat and valve. Then you could try moroso plasma seal. You wont be able to use antifreeze iirc. But if use distilled water and do proceadure carefully as moroso states ,it should work. i have had to do proceadure twice before to get a good skin build up in side water jackets. like i said i just dropped water level way down after races if it gonna sit awhile. i know guys have used plasma seal and never drop water out either with no problems.

[rebelrouser]

I will give my advice from the experience of others as well as myself. Aluminum has a fatigue cycle that is much shorter than cast iron. IE the reason aluminum rods have to be changed after a certain number of runs. Most companies throw around the 300 runs as a benchmark, I have gotten away with many more than 300 and had some fail soon after, so I follow the 300 now, failures cost too much. So, on a head the fatigue cycle is mainly hot and cold cycles, and what will give, it is the interference fit on the seats. I have a buddy who races a Hemi in NSS. He would buy older aluminum Hemi heads and had a rash of seats leaking and falling out, got quite expensive. He finally stopped throwing money at older cheap heads and just bought some new ones, ported the same way and all the leaks and seats falling out went away.
And I wish I knew more about metals and fatigue, but I also see threads giving up more in older heads as well, not so much from use but just the strength of the threads when tightening. I have seen enough that when a guy brings me an ancient swap meet aluminum head to work on, I try and shy away from the project, failure is expensive to pocketbooks and reputations. But just like some of those rods that run twice their recommended runs, your heads might do the same after repaired again, or they might not. I know I grow fond of certain parts hard to let them go to the recyclers.

[Dragsinger]

Mr Rebel, I appreciate your feedback and agree with your thoughts. You reflect my gut feeling. They will be excellent bench race topic parts.

[bill jones]

---back in the early 1980's when I was seriously doing aluminum heads I was chatting with JV Brotherton---the BRO of Brodix---and I asked him his opinion just on simple shelf life of new heads
---He told me the very best day of a new properly heat treated head is the next day after it had cooled off overnight---and then 3 years later be getting brand new freshly heat treated heads---even if that 3 year old head has never been off the self

[mag2555]

I would invest the money into to them by sending them out to be cryo tempered .
You should then get at least another race season out of them.

[BOOT]

Not sure what would be the best route for the OP but I see lots of used alum heads for sale and think nothx. Not just because they are barely cheaper than new but because I know they would prob need a lot of machine work, parts refresh and may fail anyway or are not as good as modern designs.

In this case, the OP kinda knows their history but being this is the 2nd problem and maybe the same head???