Recycling is unquestionably good for the health of
planet Earth, but it is risky when you are building a
race engine. My environmentally conscious teenage
daughter has impressed on me the importance of recycling
soft drink cans and newspapers for the good of future
generations. The motivation to reuse race engine parts
is usually financial, not ecological. I think it's just
bad business to reuse engine parts that are mismatched,
outdated, or just plain worn out in the hope of saving a
few dollars. Usually it turns out to be more expensive
in the long run, and the results are seldom what you
expected.
It is false economy to save a
dollar today and end up spending three dollars tomorrow.
Yet that is what often happens when a racer tears down a
perfectly good engine to change the entire combination.
You are generally better off in the long run to build a
new engine from scratch than to attempt to turn an old
engine into something it was never intended to be.
Suppose that you have a 468ci
big-block in your heads-up dragster. You're having a
tough time making the Quick 16 show at your local track,
so you logically conclude that you need more
displacement. You might be tempted to rebuild the motor
with a long-stroke crank and a pair of bigger cylinder
heads - but what you |
are
likely to end up with is an unhappy and potentially
unreliable engine combination. You'll also have a pile
of expensive used parts - crankshaft, rods, pistons, and
heads - that have almost no market value.
My advice is to keep your
existing engine in one piece. You can use it as a spare,
or sell it as a complete engine to finance your next
motor. Even if your old engine isn't powerful enough to
make the Quick 16 show, it's still more valuable as a
back-up or a bracket racing engine than it is as a stack
of parts on the floor of your garage.
You are asking for trouble if you bolt expensive new
parts onto a tired engine assembly. Your investment in a
pair of the latest, trickest cylinder heads can be wiped
out in an instant if an old timing chain fails or an
overstressed rod bolt breaks. Engine parts have a finite
life, so you are gambling against long odds when you bet
that you can squeeze another race or another season out
of parts that really should be retired.
Even if a recycled race engine
doesn't break, it is unlikely to perform to your
expectations. I've harped on the importance of having a
compatible combination of parts in previous
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