Starting my engine build

[davepl]

Originally Posted by toolboxchev

Some old schoolers have a ton of trick up their sleeve.

I made friends with an old engine builder a couple of years back. He worked for a well-known NASCAR team building their engines for I think 14 years before retiring back up here.

Now he has pancreatic cancer, which has a survival rate of about 0%. It's really struck me how much this guy knows that he simply won't be able to pass along before he himself passes. I ask a lot of questions, but you can't ask everything...

He's also the only guy that really knows how to run their engine dyno; no idea what'll happen to that when he's gone. I've hinted at my interest, but it's not something I want to do full time either, so wouldn't be fair to take his time mentoring if I weren't 100% serious. Plus it's hard to say "Since you're going to die, perhaps you could show me how to run this...."

But I did get to tear apart a 351W with him yesterday that had eaten the cam, which was good timing for this conversation. The lifters were totally cupped and chewed, and he said that the metal has to go somewhere, and it often winds up in the piston skirts and then screws up the cylinder walls.

And no surprise, besides having no compression in the wiped cylinders, the others had about 20% leakdown. He called all that in advance from looking at the rocker arms...

Oh well, we'll all get old one day I guess!