I haven’t read anything to suggest that the P30 and P73 is made of different material. I think they’ll work just fine. High silicone Cast pistons. More brittle than Forged, so it is important to avoid detonation with them, but the tolerances can just be soo much tighter than forged because they don’t expand nearly as much with heat.
As to your comment about the Pro1s – when I spoke with the product manager at King Motorsports over the summer, he did mention that the “problem” with the Pro1s had been sorted out. I think he was saying that the centerline for the primary and secondary lobes wasn’t the same, so you could either have a good idle and decent midrange, or a great top end – but not both. I imagine the tuner you mentioned in your thread put them at a good spot for the idle and didn’t even consider that they would be off that far from where they should make good power too…
The Spoons would basically just be some JDM bling. They should theoretically be ever so slightly better than the CTR cams. My main enthusiasm about them is that they are the “wildest” B-series cam that Honda ever made and would be a nice homage to the impact that spoon made on Honda during the era that our cars were made. Much better tribute than a fucking blue sock on my master cylinder.
As far as Skunk2s quality, I would hope that it has gotten better in the last few years. God knows I would never buy anything but cams from them but I think they have been quietly making adjustments to a lot of their stuff to improve their image. In every other area besides valvetrain, there is a different, better product available or at least one I would put more faith in for the price. In some areas, they just piss me off. Take their front camber kit. The old ball joints they used to use totally sucked and didn’t have the range of motion they needed, and they don’t actually fit our cars very well since they were made for the EF. They have been “working on” a DA specific one for years and it has yet to materialize but if you email them about it, they always say it is “in development and should be available in a few months.” But just for you I am going to rock one of those Skunk2 VTEC solenoid covers.
I read somewhere recently (when I was reading about JUN 3s) that the bumpstix are basically just a reworked JUN 3s design. I have no doubt they make good power, but I’ll let someone else do the beta testing on this batch first though, lord knows Larry isn’t afraid to beta-test shit in customer’s cars. I would really want to know where the blanks are coming from before actually putting them in MY car…
You are right about the ITR IM of course. I am just gaga about everything that came in the ITR. In fact, that is the real reason I chose ITR pistons. See, I figure that as long as more than 50% of the new parts I use are ITR, I won’t be a poser for putting the bad-ass TYPE R windshield banner on my car to match the OEM ITR stickers I got for the side, back and hood. I actually got a vinyl sticker for my sunroof that says “Type R Driver ->” so when someone sees me from an overpass, they’ll know what’s up.
In all seriousness, the ITR intake manifold is going to be the best one for my build. Before, when I had objections to it, I was thinking about runner length as a stand alone aspect which would affect where peak torque was and I wanted to maintain a wider (albeit less magnitude) power band because the B16/B17 doesn’t have any balls in the low end. But what I didn’t think about was actually matching the IM to the cams. If my cams want to put peak torque HERE but my IM wants to put peak torque over HERE, then maybe things will work out well and I’ll have a nice wide power band, but probably, I can get better gains throughout if I use cams and an intake that were actually designed to work together by some fancy Japanese mechanical engineer. Ideally, I would want a plenum volume in between the CTR and the ITR IM (if there is a difference) but this one will most definitely be better suited to ITR/CTR cams than my rinky-dink B17 IM would ever be…
In other words, you guys have made a believer out of me and it isn’t even on the damn car yet. So there. 
I appreciate your continued encouragement and enthusiasm about my build. Lord knows no one but you and Colin have the patience to read my ramblings. I am going to make a concerted effort to get the head sent off after the holiday craziness calms down and I need to take the block to the local machine shop and see if they think that I’ll need to step up to 81.25 bore diameter.
Hey, you used an ITR IM on your build, right? What did you do about the coolant hose for the FITV. Did you just get a OBDII thermostat housing, or was your B18B block new enough that you didn’t have that extra outlet?
If you can find that dyno graph of the spoon engine, I would love to see it. They did/do sell a completely balanced and blueprinted B16A, B16B and B18C(R) that is just stock internals with their headgasket and otherwise stock but, for that matter, “Spoon” pistons are just factory pistons that have been “binned” into within a gram of each other. From all I’ve heard, Spoon doesn’t do anything with them other than go through proverbial piles and sort them. They also sell ITR springs, cam seals and other random things that look just like factory…I don’t know what they supposedly do to that stuff. My point being that the only difference between a type R engine with spoon cams and a spoon engine with spoon cams is the headgasket and hand selection of parts. There only being a 3-4 HP HP difference honestly doesn’t surprise me but I would expect to see that across the entire power band and a slight shift in where peak torque is made.
