Lee’s engine build

Pre removal, its a good looking set up

When Lee last ran his Sierra, it was with a pretty tame small block Chevy street motor, the poor thing was working fairly hard to get his Sierra, as light as it is, to 9 seconds. To of pushed any harder with this motor would have just been cruel so, when the car was put in the workshop it was with the intention of making this level of abuse a bit safer and pushing the compression ratio up a bit more to closer to the limit of pump fuel. As such he treated it to a complete forged rotating assembly, considering the revs he was pushing, this is much less likely to injure someone queuing for a burger than the stock rods were.

Set up at Vibration Free

In the quest for more though he decided to get the team at Vibration Free to balance the rotating assembly. Any energy spent on vibrating your engine is wasted energy that isn’t propelling you forward so a well-balanced engine will be more efficient as well as being less harsh on all the other components in the chain. For an idea of how finely balanced these guys can achieve, a normal 4 cylinder family car engine would have a tolerance of 40g.mm, an F1 engine around 26g.mm, Vibration Free work to 10g.mm!

Now we have all the bits back in the workshop we just need to find some time around working on everyone else’s cars to get Lee’s motor back together! Hopefully the next update will be about the motor going back in the car, updated ignition system and having all of the safety critical parts of the car “re-tagged” as safe to go racing again.  

Waiting for us to have a spare moment…