The shocking cost of engine parts!

Speaking to Neil Bold he recons the cost of a new cam and followers is £110.

He went to America a while back and he said that they had run out of Ford cams so they opened it up meaning they could buy cams from other manufacturers (of the same profile etc) so over there they only cost about £10!!
why cant we do that here??

You KNOW why not. Money.

Apparently fuel pumps were £13, new price £39.

I think the just pull the prices out of a hat. Better and more unbelievable than anything Paul Daniels can do.

hang on, why cant we use the £10 ones? being thick here.

they dont have Ford stamped on them

cant we make a stamp?

fair enough, the price we pay for quality ford parts eh.

cams either have to be original specification FoMoCo ones (i.e an old cam) Or the new ones supllied with "formula ford" or something similar stamped on the side of the rear bearing, these are also serial numbered as far as im aware..

At least you didn't say 'good quality' RMR. LOL

yeah thought 'quality' was a tad to sarcastic!!

why do they need a stamp. are the other advantagous? performance wise!

What is the price of a block?

£500.I wouldn't mind, but its full of holes. Well ours is.

Originally posted by RMR
yeah thought 'quality' was a tad to sarcastic!!

why do they need a stamp. are the other advantagous? performance wise!

yup just like a maxpower sticker, it adds 50 horses...

Does anyone know where I can get a new Block?

If you 1600 boys still want to race old out of date push rod engines then parts will be expensive! You could always buy a Zetec, a brand new complete engine from Ford Motorsport is £1,100 and it only needs rebuilding every 5 seasons!

Is that Dry sumped?

Can we not utilise the 1600 Club to drum up support to get a rule change?

flatbroke,
I have a block that I will sell you, it will need liners and machining though. PM me if your interested!

Originally posted by mattray
flatbroke,
I have a bloke that I will sell you


2 camels for your wife sir!:laugh:

you know the answer? race vee!!!

Matt, whats that post got to do with engines? do you keep him under the stairs?

Only when he's been bad!

I wonder how many people are not using ford parts ? lets be honest its pretty hard for the Scruit's to check the crank.

I am under the impresion and have been told that there will be allot more (engine,flywheel,gearbox,damper) spot checks this year.Not just the inlet manifold and valve lift as normal.

Thats very interesting John,

for example

not being the most mechanical of people how will the check the gear box ? they can't ask you to take it to bits can they ??? or are the checks more likey to be eyeballing it is a hewland and has a reverse gear.

Same goes for the engine, putting parts of the engine back together on a race weekend could be a real problem depending on how far they go with checking ?

See Section 15 FF 1600Regs
"ALL ENGINES SHOULD HAVE PROVISION FOR SCRUTINEER'S WIRE SEALS"

If the scruiterneers at car racing are anythig like the scruitineers at kart meetings, then they will happily have you strip your gearbox at the end of a race.

In the days when I was karting, the scruitineers had us taking out axles so they could check if they were hollow. They did it to the whole field, and it is a good 1.5 hour job. Also once you had taken the bearings off, you would have to put new ones on so the cost/time factor doesnt seem to concern scruitineers.

But the power trip does... well for some of them he adds hastily hedging his bets..LOL


HAs that guy been for the scooby tyres yet Ian

if there is no advantage in using parts without a ford stamp on ie components such as cams/follower and they are cheaper then surely it will benefit racers??? at the moment surely the regs are in favour of the engine builders. especially as the regs are written for when ford where producing loads of these many years ago.

Slam a duratec engine in the back

I think Mattray suggested some time ago that a spec. steel crank should be allowed. Sounds good to me as that is the major reason for rebuilds but think there are probably too many vested interests to consider it.

I would imagine if my business was engine builder I'd prefer FF1600 lumps that need a build every 10 hours+.

Originally posted by flatbroke
Does anyone know where I can get a new Block?

Burton in Ilford 0208 554 2281

www.burtonpower.com

It might be nice to have a design that didn't bend exhaust valves every now and again. I know you shouldn't do it, but it would stop a lot of excuses/spoilt races,

Originally posted by JohnMiller
I think Mattray suggested some time ago that a spec. steel crank should be allowed. Sounds good to me as that is the major reason for rebuilds but think there are probably too many vested interests to consider it.

I would imagine if my business was engine builder I'd prefer FF1600 lumps that need a build every 10 hours+.
u can have one of these "power" or "longlivity" which one ya gonna have?, if u want an engine thats gonna last 10000000 thousand miles my friend has a nissan engines diesel black cab with 900,000miles on it if your interested....:laugh:


karting dad - head gasket is about 2-3mm thick, fit 10 of these at once and some super long head bolts and i think your problems will be over :P

Originally posted by kartingdad
£500.I wouldn't mind, but its full of holes. Well ours is.


yeh you got one of the special ones with the viewing window :laugh:

To be fair to the engine builders the cost of the parts has to be passed on to the customer so they arent benefiting from the high parts costs, the labour on the engines would be the same whatever the cost of the parts! and the people at the front would probably end up having are-build every year anyway!

So the people that make the rules are FoMoCo? so no chance of getting the rules changed for the benefit of us? how did they do it in the USA then??

Mattray, why would they want to change the rules? What's in it for them? We are probabably a damn sight more trouble than we are worth anyway, being a bunch of skint racing anoraks.They are making a fortune out of us!

as far as im aware fomoco have to pass any rule change to do with formula ford (im sure diz can confirm/deny that) hence why would ford let you use another part and give other people the money then you can buy a new crank off the shelf from them...

So how can it be changed? I dont care if we start to call it Formula formerly known as Ford but why should they still be making the rules about engines?? they have no interest in the Kent engine, they dont even have any interest in the Zetec so where is the benefit to them by keeping it Formula Ford???

Tradition, I think it's known as. The tradition of buying parts of a 30 odd year design (and tooling and economies of scale etc.) and charging us 2004 money.

You are just jealous you did not think of it first!

costs dear boy, open it up and you;ll have £3000 cranks, £500+ pistons, £1000 rods, super acurate;y timed cams, etc etc it'd just snowball, then the less well off drivers wouldnt suffer even more

we could call this new series "formulacostuafortune"

Surely by opening it up you wil create competition for our business and the costs will come down?!

It depends I think,

If the FoMoCo stopped supplying the bits as they have no interest in Kent engines, there would be few suppliers who would be interested in machining these bits as there is a relatively small market for them.

If there were one or two independent manufacturers, they would be producing to smaller volumes, which would mean there costs per unit would be higher as a result. This would prevent the costs from being as cheap as we like. Also with just one or two suppliers available, they would have a monopoly style market position, and as demand for these bits is price inelastic (the demand is constant despite the price) why would the new suppliers drop the price by as much as we would hope they would?? They would be making less money.

If loads of suppliers made the bits, the prices could fall, but then we would have the problem of who made the best bits??? Invariably, the more you pay, the better the quality is, so we are back where we started.

Its just something we have to live with unfortunately.

yup t'sprog (:p) has it correct, also you'd end up with people with more money buying the best bits and the racing then becomes an "ive got more money than you so i can afford better bits in my engine, getting a better end result and whippin' everyones ass's thats no fun at all! having one fixed supplier prevents this and makes everything fairly level and its just down to how its put together and how its used,