Guideplates
Guideplates Are these the correct Guideplates to get for LT1 heads??
http://www.trickflow.com/partdetail....&N=400098+150+
If so, how do I go about ordering them? I don't see it anywhere
http://www.trickflow.com/partdetail....&N=400098+150+
If so, how do I go about ordering them? I don't see it anywhere
Yeah, I know. I've read numerous post that people say "make sure they fit LT1 heads" because some SBC guideplates won't fit on LT1 heads. I was just wanting to make sure before I spend money. 
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TECH Veteran
Joined: Dec 2008
Posts: 4,147
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From: Little Rock, AR
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Verdad Gallardo LT1 valve spacing is a little different from most other smallblock heads. I tried Comp guideplates at one time and the alignment was poor, so I went GMPP guideplate and those wore so I then bought Isky adjustables.
Has anyone had problems with the TFS guideplates?
TECH Veteran
Joined: Dec 2008
Posts: 4,147
Likes: 62
From: Little Rock, AR
By their nature, they should be hardened. The deal with the GM plates was that some of them apparently missed getting hardened.
Years ago I had a set of GM plates on my bolt on motor. One day a rocker fell off of a valve because one push rod wore a slot nearly 1/8" in one guide plate. The rocker was damaged and the top of the valve face was damaged as well. I also saw a noticeable amount of wear on many of the other slots on the other guide plates. All this with less than 3K miles of use.
Bottom line is these guide plates were not hardened. I determined this by dragging a file across one and it tried to cut the surface. On a hardened plate, the file will not cut it. It will just glide across and not leave a blemish and will in fact make a totally different sound during the file test compared to an unhardened plate.
I was running Comp pro-mag rockers and 7.200" PR's at the time and the rocker geometry appeared decent so I could not detect anything that I did wrong to cause this to happen. I did use "cheap" hardened PR's but they were hardened none the less.
I bought another full set of GM guide plates and they were not hardened either. I did however harden them myself using Kasenit powder that is used to harden tooling. The powder is a mix of organic material that smells like cat **** while performing the hardening process. I heated the two slots up on the guide plate cherry red and dipped it into the powder. Did this three times and on the fourth time, after heating they were dipped in water to perform a queching process. The results before and after were night and day.
To this day and after 15K miles, there is absolutely no wear period on my self hardened guide plates. I would never run a guide plate unless its hardened period.
Take a file (like one pictured below) and just run it across an edge of one of the plates and if it does nothing to it at ALL it IS hardened? If it starts to grind away at the surface its NOT hardened?
