Yes, You Can Resurface Cylinder Heads with a Treadmill… If You’re Brave

Specialized shop tools get expensive, and fast. If you want to buy a machine to resurface cylinder heads, you’ll likely sink at least $3,000 into it, and depending on how snazzy you want it to be, you could spend so much more. Or, if paying that much money is out of the question, you can hire it out to a machinist who already has the equipment, and you can wait. Let’s say neither of those is an option for you—then what do you do? If you’re like David Miller, the guy behind Hemi Garage Hacks on YouTube, you build your own device out of a treadmill.

He’s not joking, either. Miller claims to have resurfaced well over 1,000 cylinder heads with his homemade contraptions in the past 13 years. That’s not bad considering his latest iteration cost him less than $500 to put it together.

As he explains in his latest video upload, Miller based this build on a high-weight-limit treadmill and a medical gurney. It utilizes a slab of granite as well as a sheet of glass on top, which provides a sturdy base that allows the custom-ordered sanding belts to move freely on top. There’s a metal bar at the end that acts as a backstop for the cylinder heads, and with that in place, it’s a fairly low-effort job.

It apparently takes four or five heads to break in each belt, so until it’s reached that point, he manually smooths the surface of each one. After that, it cleans them up nicely, and he’s able to complete a full resurface in minutes. Doing it well requires moving the head back and forth on the belt, as well as changing the direction at least once, if not twice. While this might not be the trickiest job, it’s an exact one that requires a precise end result.

Miller notes that the most crucial part of the build is ensuring the sanding surface is true. To do that, he says to place a straight edge on the surface of the glass with a head resting on it to ensure the measurement is accurate. Check for gaps front to back using a .001-inch feeler gauge, and if there’s any opening, place a shim between the glass and the granite. You’ll be glad you did.

Every head that leaves this makeshift machining bench gets tested with a straight edge afterward. That .001-inch feeler gauge ensures that they’re flat all the way across, from the outer edges clear to the inside. If this process didn’t work, then the engines wouldn’t hold compression once they’re reassembled. In other words, any failure would be obvious.

I think this is a stellar example of doing what you can with what you have. It’s simply not an option for a lot of people or small shops to purchase high-dollar machining tools, and if you can build one at home that saves you the time of waiting on someone else to do the job for you, then it’s a win-win. Plus, if you’re using yours for customer builds, you’ll make your relatively minuscule investment back in no time.

If it sounds stupid and it works, then it isn’t stupid.

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