[mgarblik]

I am posting this thread as a general "heads up" for people building their own engines from catalog parts. I am not willing to reveal vendors because that's not the point. But this is what we have seen in the shop in the last 3 weeks in our engine building class. Student brought in a set of Chinese H-Beam rods. Very proud of the fact that they had ARP 2000 bolts. We measured them on the Sunnen AG-300 precision gauge. NONE of the 8 were usable as delivered. All 8 had .0008"-.0012" taper across the big end. They were ALL .0002" outside the large end of the tolerance for size. I had him send them back. Next set came in a week later. Exactly the same. We had to break them down, cut caps and rods and hone them. Came out very nice. I am almost certain they would have spun bearings if run hard. We have had two "Balanced Assemblies" Purchased and brought in. One Small Block Ford, One LS. Nice looking stuff. Balanced, YES. Balanced correctly....... well not really. The LS was out 14 grams on the front and 26 grams out on the rear. The Ford out 39 grams on the front and 55 grams on the rear. Bottom line here is: If your buying all this Chinese stuff, balanced assembly or not, please take all of it to a competent machine shop and pay a couple hundred bucks to have every piece checked out before assembly. Buying "Kits" and throwing it all together is just a crap shoot IMO. You may get lucky, but I haven't won the lottery in my lifetime. This is one of the reasons I am often recommending just rebuiding the stock rods with new hardware for mild builds. At least that doesn't drastically change the balance. Good luck out there.