I was at a local shop today, asking for some quotes on what the cost would be to cleanup my heads, block, intake and balance the assembly. I told him I would like the stock rods/stock crank/speed pro pistons internally balanced. He told me there was no point in doing that, I looked at him with this stare of "**** ****** *****". Anyway, I told him that the engines from the factory come internally balanced, some have filler in the balancer, others don't... he told me "NO NO NO, they just take whatever and throw it together". I didn't want to kill the guy at the moment, but I was damn close. Anyway, he was pretty knowledgable about some other things like milling the heads and crap that I didn't really care about, hes not the normal guy I deal with in that shop, but he says I have to have my balancer and flywheel for him to even balance it.

Now, wtf man! Why can't I... according to him, internally balance my rotating assembly, I'll be switching out flywheels on a regular basis and they will not be the same weight, so wtf.

(M6 car, not A4 so don't say its a Flexplate please )

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, also what would be a good way to get all the road tar and gunk off of the undertray of a 120,000 mile car?

 

Who did you take it to? The LT1 is such an unusual engine that personally I wouldn't let an engine builder touch mine unless he'd worked on them before. I'll PM you more stuff that is more local to our area.

 

Yeah, I went to Morgan's Machine Shop of all places, I heard good stuff about them, but I guess Tri Valley and that place right off of Cowell Rd. and Galindo, I forget the name, but oh well.

There's so much this car needs right now its ridiculous.

Thanks

 

Joes Machine shop? I have heard good things about him. Buddy had his 65 Stang rebuilt there and its excellent but from what I hear they generally do older cars mostly. I have heard good things about Morgans too.

 

All 1 piece cranks are externally balanced. Look closely at a LT1 dampener. Don't understand his comment about they throw everything on it!? It's expensive to internally balance a crank that was not designed to be done that way. I just did one. About 30% are impossible to be done correctly. They have to be replaced and start over. I'm lucky to have an old guy doing it that is meticulous as hell.

Also when you do internally balance it you need a neutral dampener (easy to find) and a neutral flywheel. Neutral flexplates for 1 piece seal cranks are a B@#$% to find.I had to get a normal one and have it neutral balanced. You might want to consider buying a balanced rotating assembly from a reputable company like PAW, or Doug Herbert or Scoggin-Dickey. Just have the machine shop do your block work. That's pretty easy.

 

Why go stock? If you're getting your engine torn apart stroke it. From what I hear there really isn't much of a price difference.

 

Thanks badass... The reason I preffered to get it internally balanced was because I was going to be using the stock steel flywheel until I could fork out another $1200 for a McLeod setup which is aluminium and thats a good 8-10lbs weight difference.

The reason I don't want to go all out is because this is a "hold me over" engine that I'll be beating the **** out of until some time mid next year when I will actually be putting "something" into it.

 

Unless you're rich you're wasting money!!! I remember you saying you wanted to rebuild a 68 or 69 Camaro or something like that. Jesus, when you're done with this Camaro keep all your receipts, give me a call and I'll buy it!

 

Just read your post at http://web.camaross.com/forums/showt...ferrerid=26833

Man, for all the extra money you're wasting you could make a low compression stroker and then throw a Supercharger or Turbocharger on it and make SERIOUS horsepower. Swapping out the engines like that is a waste given you have a perfectly fine engine in your car already!

 

Damn....

Don't get me started about the external/internal/neutrally balanced thing......

Like said before, the LT1 one-piece crank is balanced to the stock harmonic balancer/stock flywheel(flexplate). Any change in the harmonics of the assembly can f*ck it up, unless you match everything like badass383 said.

Take my case, for example:
"Friends" did an auto to T-56 conversion on my 396.
They questioned about the balancing of the flywheel.
I said to call the engine builder, because I didn't know how he had it set up.
They didn't look to see the STOCK balancer and STOCK flexplate on the engine.
They used a neutrally-balanced flywheel.
2 days later, my $10000 motor lost oil pressure.

MOTHERFU*KERS!

That was a year ago. I'm still pissed.

Yes, the car will be fixed soon

Mike

 

Like I said in my PM, money is very tight. My Bronco is sitting in the back where the garden use to be... HAHA DIE GARDEN! DIE! Yeah, anyway, its got a nice $6000 parts list waiting to be served up and it still needs to be prepped and painted. So that gets some attention and funds as well. The 68 is a no go, I had planned to sell my Z, but no ones wants to buy it, and I don't blame them, the money I would have to put into it to sell it for a decent price is well over $2000. So why not keep it and work with it somehow.

What I posted on that other thread is just some idea's I'm tossing around, I want to build a test bed car for various 4th gen products, maybe market some, maybe not, I dunno, but I want to get my toy's out of the way before I start getting serious about life and buying a house, setlling down and whatnot. One of the plans I have is a CARB legal dual exhaust. It uses the late 95-97 dual catalytic convertor piping, but instead of merging together, its cut after the convertor where an x pipe is slipped on and the dual piping runs through the stock routing and out the back end of the car... relatively a "bolt on" process with only some minor cutting. Etc. etc., the list goes on and on, but you get the idea.

 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention the reason why I'm even building the LT1 up. I'm attending various track days and driving the car several thousand miles a month at times, so it needs to be "freshened" up, nothing to exotic, just something durable enough to take the abuse of a 1000 miles of highway driving, 6-8 hours of road racing, and another 1000 miles driving back.

 

Well, I have a neutral balance harmonic balancer from the factory. 1 piece cranks are not all external balanced, so i'm not sure where your getting your info from.

I had to get my flexplate balanced with the assembley. Cost of flexplate and balancing was around $300. Take it to someone who knows something, these guys sounds like they haven't worked on an internal LT-1.

-Shannon

 

Yeah I know NOMAD, my damper has no filler in it at all, I just put it on anyway because of that and I have no vibration since, and I run my car hard every day.

 

Same here

-Shannon