Hey I'm just wondering if I were to replace the head on my ba futura, and potentially shave a few thou.. Do you think it would be essential to have the ecu retuned, or is the ecu smart enough to learn differences in compression and work with/benefit from these changes? Any opinions will be highly appreciated!

Cheers MaTTe.

ECU will adapt to a certain extent.. go to far and a reflash/edit would be required.

look in the mags heaps of places othering head work now.the more work the chance is you will have to put on a piggyback chip.

Don't need piggy backs on Ba's..

Sounds all to be good. I don't plan to bump compressions up too much, just want to shave the head a little on a low km head, maybe do a little port and polishing, and look at F6 valve springs. shouldn't be anything too hard for the ecu to figure out.

Cheers guys!

Be careful shaving your Ba head the valves are so close to the pistons Ford only recommend one shave then throw away.

i would be looking at going down the usual CAI/extractors/flash tune before i went down the road of head modifications

i wouldn't waste my time / money

you can get insane power levels out of BA's without even opening the engine. Theres a fella on here with 200 rwkw in his XT with just bolt on mods and an edit IIRC

a little background to the project.. the car already has the standard bolt on equiptment, which is all well and good. I don't however have the flash edit tuner.
my car has a few k's on it, most of which were done before it was in my hands.. the car runs beautifully especially now, although at idle after warming up, the tappetts show their age. I have been told that as electronic tappetts they only tend to give trouble when you play around with them..
I figure it's just as easy to rip the head off, find a good working low km head, shave it as much as it needs, recondition it a little, and reattach.

My main query was what the ecu is likely to think, or whether it'll care at all. The suggestion of valve clearances however is always worthy of keeping in mind! I would be getting all the machine work done by the guys machining our race blocks and heads, so i'm not worried about tolerances, I just deal more with carby cars, so I find my efi knowledge a little lacking..

Cheers Guys

And edit it well worth it, however... it's best to do it after you're done with all mechanical work you're likely to want, so it can make the most of what you have.