Mike,
 Thanks for the comment.  Yes they are expensive but if you want to stay in this business for a while, you must have up to date equipment.  I did a set of Duramax diesel heads last week. Valve guides, valve job and resurface was $750  It took me the better part of two days to do the guide and seat work correctly with my old equipment.  I bet I could have finished them in 4 hours or so with the Rottler, maybe even faster.  So if I could get one more set of those heads each month, it would pay the payment and I would still be saving time that I could use to do other things.  Right now if someone called me to do another set I would probably turn them away just becasue of the hasle it was with my present equipment

Last edited by MrBill (6/22/2015 8:09 am)

Bill
I looked at rottler SG8  back in 07 when I got my new VGS 20 and at the time the big issues were being able to hold the head ridgid enough and paralell to the boring head end for end for ease of non adjustable valve train stuff.

The other thing was tooling compatability. I already had 1000's of dollars in tooling for .385 pilots and was not prepared to sell it off at pennies on the dollar paid.

Now that the original Sioux pilots are not longer available converting to the more common .375 top pilots is the way to got as there is a ton of new designs if drivers and rottler has now stepped up their game and has tooled up other key components of the machine for ease of compatability to make the up grade less painfull.

Their SG8 at the time did not have the room between the quill and seat to do some heads easily and again required their tooling but now I have seen what they have done with the changes to the machine and tooling and if I needed a replacement I would go with the rottler.
It has the best of both worlds now and can be used as either a dead pilot system or live pilot like a serdi.
The head fixture is far better then a serdi on a good day making it easy to keep all tye seats the same height and paralell to the deck surface as they use a fixture similar to the VGS 20.

I asked the rottler rep before I went sunnen about how cloce the fixture slide surface and the boring head track surface was to paralell and I was told then .010-.015 but it did not really make any difference because you could grind the valve tip to get the tip installed heights correct. Sunnen said as delivered the end to end difference would be no more then .001" and it was which I thing is the most important feature of the machine because the valve cover surface on alot of todays aluminum heads are machined paralell to the deck making mounting easier.

From memory the rottler has a T-slot to bolt the fixture to the bed for improved ridgidity when doing heavy cutting like enlarging for bigger valves or cutting seat pockets on iron heads. It also helps reduce vibrations causing chatter with respect to difficult valve seats. Some cut like butter some not so much.I have made some clamps for my VGS to do the same thing but some times wish the t-slots were built in to the bed.



My vote would be the Rottler but the machine size would need to be slightly larger like the SG9 if you get lots of diesel stuff like cummins or cat head work.

Last edited by Dave Conway (6/23/2015 8:13 pm)

Forgot to mention that Rottler also has the best selection of carbide pilots for their machines as well as others in .0002 size increases.
They do not offer HSS pilots any longer but tooling can be up graded as they make drivers to fit any S+G machine and with the now common .375 top pilot size they have the best and largest inventory of pilots.
But be fore warned about the conversion from SAE sizing  to metric millimeters as there is minor differences as something gets lost in the conversion. Sort of like a crank that is ground .25 under and you use a -.010 bearing the clearance size you wanted differs 

Last edited by Dave Conway (6/24/2015 10:50 pm)

Sedri uses the same style pilots but their size ordering is less complicated but they have a much small option list for their pilots compared to Rottler.
Less costly as well from what guys have told me but they dod interchage with eash other