Well I was cruising in my z28 and decided to blow out the dust the other day. Its just a mild 350 new shortblock with 210 dur, .450 lift cam, and afr 190 heads. I bought these heads new in 98 and just put this engine together May(procrastinator). It ran strong and I have put about 3k miles on it. In my attempts to blow out the dust, the engine died at about 4500 rpm. Pop the hood pull out the plugs and low and behold # 8 is destroyed. Get it towed home and take it apart tonight to find that the exhaust valve broke in half and beat up every thing it could before embedding itself in the piston. I had heard the horror stories about afr's assembled heads and chose to not listen. Now the 227's are coming off my project car and being sent to a reputable builder to have quality parts installed. I now have a set of 1400$ boat anchors that arent heavy enough to hold the boat the sad thing is this is just a car me and the wife like to tool around in with the tops off 4 or 5 times a year. Im sure its not even worth asking AFR if they will stand behind the product since I bought them so long ago. Here are the pics.

 

man sorry about your bad luck

 

Ouch, I feel for you

 

Not a good thing to see. Sorry for your luck.

 

Well I guess you just made me decide to with LT4 heads... Sorry about your loss....

 

Daymn! I hate to see things like that.

 

Sorry to read about your bad experience.

There have been several posts of late about the poor quality of AFR heads. Guys are still standing in line to buy them though, just drooling over the flow numbers.

AFR won't get me as a customer.

Jake

 

I would say they still have one of the best castings....buy the bare heads and have them assembled elsewhere...

 

When I first bought the TFS heads, I asked their tech sopport if my RR will clear the head and they didn't know. Asked them whether the cam had too high a lift and they didn't know either. Finally ended up ordering perimeter bolt heads with their improved springs and they didn't have them made up so I had to buy their springs and have them installed myself. Had to clay the engine to find out that there was tons of room. Of course, if I had known that there was no room, I would not have had the motor torn apart at a facility 150 miles away. Instead I had to chance it.

Less than 2 weeks after I had it installed, they sent me a set of guideplates because the ones on the head were not up to spec. Here we go again into the VC area.

Just less than 3 months after the job, I found out that my motor was junk. Call that inexperience. I should have done a compression check. Well, out came that motor and I had LPE clean the heads and check them and at the time, they were fine.

Well, 3 years later, I forget what I was trying to fix. Either an oil leak or some rattling coming from under the VC. Found out that the driver side was fine but the passenger side had "C"s worn out into the guideplates. Took out a guideplate and while I was looking around, I found a broken spring. Replaced it and all the worn guideplates.

6 months later I took the intake manifold out to fix another oil leak. Decided to take the heads off to see if there was any damage since the compression came out around 165 to 180 psi. Found out that the 165 psi one was the #4. When I removed the head I found that I could see the piston ring because a chunk had been broken off by the valve and bounced around. Cylinder was scarred beyond repair and piston was broken. Took the motor out and bought new heads. Traded the TFS ones in towards the R&R. They took the heads apart to inspect them. The driver side one was good. The pass side was so loose that the valves rattled in the guides once the springs were removed.

My theory was that the resistance between the pushrod and the guideplate and the wobbling of the valves combined caused some sort of problem with the spring and it broke. Since there were 2 springs and 1 broke, it could still close but at higher RPM, it would float and bounced off the piston.

My feeling was that I would not buy heads and run them out of the box like I did with the TFS heads. I would buy bare heads and load them up any ways I wanted.

 

I agree there castings are nice, except I guess for the one members with the porosity problem. I just wonder if they are putting better components in the new lsx heads?

 

Hello...

Why is it always assumed that broken parts are automatically due to "inferior" parts used by the manufacturer? Also, why not try contacting the manufacturer before posting pictures and negative commentary on various forums and automatically "assuming" they don't care and won't warranty or stand behind their product?? If it wasn't for one of our customers looking out for our best interest, we wouldn't have even known about this situation....how could we possibly help?? The valves used in your cylinder head are NOT "inferior" parts....They are either manufactured by Manley or REV and are top of the line 21-4N one piece stainless steel valves.....but EVERY manufacturer will occasionally ship a part that might fail. Using good quality components is the only way we can try to keep that situation to a minimum. Also, valve failure might be the RESULT of something else, not necessarily the CAUSE (ie. valve float, not enough piston to valve clearance, incorrect spring pressure for a particular application, etc.). I am not “implying” that is the case here or not, just felt the need to make mention of it. We would like the opportunity to evaluate the cylinder head and see if we can somehow get a better idea of what might have happened. If there seems nothing obvious pointing towards something else, we will stand behind our product and either repair (if possible) or replace the damaged cylinder head at no charge. We would like you to return both heads in the exact condition they came off the shortblock (don't clean them at all). I would like you to contact me here at AFR and I will be provide you with an RGA # to put on the box. We will do our best to evaluate and turn the heads back around to you ASAP.

We do value customer service and always go the extra mile for all of our customers. Many of us here are car enthusiasts as well, and none of us like to see or hear about the type of damage you sustained. We have all had parts fail at one time or another....it is unfortunately a risk we all take modifying and building performance vehicles. The key is to correctly access the situation and try to figure out what might have caused it so hopefully it doesn't happen again. We ship 600-700 pairs of heads a month....the percentage of "problems" that we have is literally a "fractional" figure....less than one quarter of one percent.

We are a stand up company guys....But if you don't give us an opportunity there is not much we can do.

I look forward to hearing back from you...

Contact me @ (818)890-0616 Ext. 109

Thank you,
Tony Mamo
AFR Sales / Product Design

 

Tony, nicely said. I have had my share of problems with performance parts resulting in failures. Nice to see a manufacturer willing to help with the problem. Any time I have been in a bad situation , other companies(I will not name anyone) have not even been willing to return my call. The others called back to tell me to pound sand. Pete

 

Good job Tony, thats the right way to do business.

 

Ive always been a fan of AFR heads tho Ive never owned a set. I was wanting to put a set on my B2k, but the stories like this + a 20k shortblock made me apprehensive.

Glad to see Tony come on the thread start the process to making it right. It makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of putting them on my car.

 

All that you've said is well and good, from a warranty/customer servie/satisfaction stand-point, but the issue here is quality control NOT what AFR will or won't do after a part fails. An ounce of prevention . . .

If anyone at AFR is truly concerned about these issues, which seem to continue to crop up on this and other boards, I would suggest an in-depth investigation and evaluation be conducted by AFR to get to the core of these issues.

I've seen quality control issue posts regarding AFR heads on the ThirdGen.Org board as well. I haven't taken it upon myself to try to identify other boards which may have similar complaints.

Since modifying the Chevy engine so popular my suspicion is that there are other boards where posters have had quality control issues with AFR products. The old adage "Where there's smoke there's fire" comes to mind.

It's been my experience that companies tend not to want to admit to flaws in their products. Our history is replete with examples, one result of which has resulted in Ralph Nader's name becoming so well known.

Also, the . . ."fractional figure . . ." argument is often used by other companies whose products come under scrutiny due to recurring failures. Some of those manufacture exploding tires, air bags that, when deployed, injure and kill, on and on and on. To me such a ". . .fractional figure . . ." argument is unconvincing and without merit.

It could be reassuring to many of us if AFR would inform us of the results of their investigation and damage analysis - the porous castings issue is an excellent example - and of the steps already taken or being taken to address the problem when one is found to exist.

Bottom Line: As these issues continue to be reported, AFR's reputation will certainly suffer.

Jake

 

Do what Tony says, send the heads back. Never assume they won't help out. Make them committ before you black ball them. Hey, we all might learn something from all this.

 

Here's my AFR story. Local machine shop assembled a 383 with AFR 190 heads for a friend of mine. Motor burnt 1 qt of oil every 200-300 miles from the beginning. Car was driven 2000 to 3000 miles that way. At the time the oil consumption was blamed on KB hypereutectic pistons. The machine shop made good on the problem by taking the motor over the winter to install different pistons, and do the needed processes to properly install them. When they disassembled the motor the noticed that the casting and machining of the AFR heads left the oil drain backs very high in the heads, along with the spring pockets being machined into the heads, leaving the springs constantly sitting in a puddle of oil, that was above the bottom of the valve seal. The machinist called AFR questioning the oil situation. They were told not to do any work to improve drain back, as they would hit water. The tech rep did nothing to question the valve seals being used. As far as I know the machinist told the rep that the seals had been changed to teflon. A popular replacement on most other heads. The engine was reassembled with the new pistons, and guess what still smoked. As bad as before.

This is where I came in. After asking questions around I found out about teflon seals not sealing to the valve guides. Since the AFR design left the seals in a puddle of oil at all times, other than when they siphon the puddle dry into the cylinders as the car sits. There was the oil consumption problem.

This should have been a known problem to AFR, yet nothing was mentioned in 2 phone calls to them. Phone calls to AFR were made, nothing came from them, and many hours were wasted chasing the problem down.

The casting problems have been brought up many times. The other thing that was pointed out to me is how small the water passages are. Then you've got the issue with having to double valve cover gaskets on center bolt heads to get them to seal. Too much little BS and then you get all the nickle and dime "options" that drive up the price.

 

I no longer think that there is such a thing as a non repairable aluminum head. Back when I was racing Fords, I dropped a valve, it broke, completely shattered the valve seat and sent shrapnel to many other cylinders, not to mention a destroyed piston, cyl wall etc. This one head was grenaded, looked destroyed with broken valve guide area etc. A friend at a machine shop suggested that I call Brodix, keep in mind this was a Ford SVO head, and they said send it to us. It came back so good that I wanted to send my other racing heads to them so they would all look like that one. Can't remember the price but a fraction of what a new replacement would have cost.

EJ

 

Tony - I am very impressed with the way you have responded and hope everything works out for the best. I was on the fence as to what kind of company AFR is and I think you have just answered my doubts.

 

The same thing hapend to my engine but the exhaust valve grouded itself into the block and twisted the connecting rod and cracked the crank. Also ruined all the bearings with the metal shavings everywhere. Good luck
Also this time around I bought the trickflows cnc'd 195's and lightly ported them. Should go good. And haven't hered anything bad about them. Alot cheaper to.