First off, I'm not posting a half cocked response to my bad experience with my Dart 225cc heads. I'm giving advice on what to do if you are considering Dart heads. After a year of dealing with oil consumption to the tune of 1-1.5 quarts every 1000-1500 miles, I finally took the car back to the shop and had them do a leakdown test trying to isolate the issue. My problem started immediately after installing the heads and LS6 intake last February/March. I think they probably thought I was cuckoo constantly coming back mentioning the oil consumption as well as spark knock that just progressively kept getting worse with time. My training in Navy A school years ago was K.I.S.S. Most know what it means and this case proved it accurate again. Thinking pcv or ring blowby etc was all wasted time. I had considerable oil all over my back two plugs, which made us think it was isolated to those two cylinders. Well, after saving money for other mods, I finally decided to bring it in and end the debate. The machine shop found every single valve guide to be horribly out of spec and 4 bent valves in one cylinder head. And no, there was absolutely no piston to valve contact anywhere. There was no abnormal wearing of the valveguides indicating poor valvetrain geometry. The MS also found I was having coil bind issues as well. They removed shims and did whatever else that was needed to correct my clearances needed for correct seat pressure and installed height etc. I get it back tomorrow and let's just say Dart didn't want to help and I figured they'd say I should have sent them back to them. You tell me, would you after finding what I did? They frickin make them for the love of Who. So some could bash me, but I didn't have weeks for them to decide who's at fault and go through that song and dance. I'm going to be glad to have it back tomorrow making the power it should have in the beginning.
So, get your Dart heads bare and have them assembled and machined by someone like TEA or another reputable head shop who inspects their work and isn't trying to shove a head out the door. Oh, and the originally installed driver side head spewed coolant out a casting crack last year and had to be replaced with a new one they happened to have.

 

I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. These kinds of issues are super frustrating and not fun to deal with. I've been lucky, I installed my Dart 225's 18 months ago and haven't had a single issue. I did disassemble and check every part on the heads before I installed them and everything was within spec.

Good luck and I hope all turns out well.

 

I had Dart 205's, but they were a very early set when they were first introduced. I too disassembled them and lapped the valves. Based on some of the stories I have read since and a concern from my tuner, it was likely fortunate I did. My guides were good and the heads didn't use any oil. I have since swapped them out for a set of AFR's.

I have read over the last few years that some have found the guides to be very sloppy and the valves were not correctly centered so they leaked. That may have been the reason yours were bent on one head, if they were all off center then a bending load would be put into the valve. It may actually be a good thing you pulled them as if the heads of the valves were contacting off center, they may have eventually fatigued and broke off causing major motor damage.

Good luck with the fixes, hope it all works out.

 

Thanks guys. Sucks about how expensive my heads turned in to. Dart is offering no help, but I guess that's even more expected in the performance parts industry. Looking forward to getting it back today. I had 20 degrees of timing in that thing.

 

Glad to hear your getting your car back.

So was the knock issue related to oil consumption?

 

Sorry to hear about your issues with the Dart heads....

I hope you dont mind, but Im going to throw in my nickels worth of advice as a manufacturer.

In a nutshell, your decision to not allow Dart to look at (and hopefully repair) your own heads sealed the deal on whether they can do anything for you.

I think most of you guys recognize our company as extremely solid when it comes to customer service and IMO we bend over backwards for our customers (remember how we handled the soft valve tip issues years back) but honestly we would have handled your situation no differently than Dart did.

You have to give the manufacturer the option to evaluate their own warranty or issues with the product.....any product (not just cylinder heads) or don't expect them to cut you a check because it wont happen 99 out of 100 times.

You cant roll into your local dealership when your car is still under warranty and say I had a local shop fix a bad head gasket.....here is the bill. You know how that situation would end up....this, while different, is essentially very much the same.

I post this as a heads up and a courtesy to all who would consider the same course of action and expect a different result....it wont happen.

Another issue worthy of consideration here is if the product you bought is from a highly qualified manufacturer/vendor, no one is better handled to fix it than them and if you cant trust them to do it properly you should question your original decision to purchase from them in the first place. And realize Im talking in very general terms here, not isolating Dart, our company, or anyone else's.

Anyway....it sucks what happened, but in any mass produced parts mistakes will occasionally slip out the door....the better your QC along the way the less likely it is to happen but no company is perfect. Its the ones you see it happen alot to that you ought to be smart enough to look the other way when it comes time to make a purchase decision....as a consumer thats really all you can do in an effort to hopefully not have the same (or similar) situation happen again.

Good luck getting her back together and most of what I post is meant to help others following along because I can tell from what you posted you already had a clue it would probably go this way.....just hoped it might go differently.

-Tony

 

I can testify as one of the customers from AFR with the soft valve tip issue, they went above and beyond my expectations with providing parts and cash to fix my problem. If it weren't for me living in Belize ( Central America ), I would send my heads to AFR for a freshening up, they have 81000 miles and still running strong.
Thanks

 

Tony, I'm completely with you on this. I just figured I would have been taking a chance sending them out to Dart as well, and after finding all the issues with the heads, Lord knows what I would have gotten back. And I do recognize that mass manufacturing has acceptable error percentages, it just landed on me. However, when other folks won't even buy Darts heads assembled due to the same issue, that tells me it's more than just a accidental one off situation. I really have tried to be as respectful and factual as possible as well.
To make things even worse, I now have a bad rod bearing. Guess that's what happens when the heads are right and your stock bottom end is tired.