How Much Does an LS Engine Build Cost?

one of our more successful engine programs is by far LS engine program we've had a lot of development with it not only for Street driven cars or like our project RX7 that's running an e-rod but for full out builds like the daiyoshi Horas program that we were part of yeah like form of the drift road racing uh even boats or whatever I think we can build a pretty sick LS here so with that said we've had a lot of inquiries about our LS engines how much they cost and like many of you know there are a ton of options for LS builds what we're going to go over today is what are budget lawn block and then also what our baller long block will cost and we'll be mostly concentrating on the formula we've been using here which is the Long Rod LS correct uh Long Rod four inch stroke perfect so those are the details that we're going to get into today so with that said let's get into the ls what's pretty interesting is this particular LS3 was one of our customers that did a uh s13 with the ls Swap and he put a brand new uh Jam performance crate LS3 in this s chassis but then he was storing it at a shop and this shop literally started this car up and drove it outside and then drove it back in every single day now this engine had like Zero Street and zero track hours it was a brand new engine my friend's really busy so it's his play car and he didn't even get to take it out and it was in storage but being moved five days a week for a year and it completely destroyed the engine so that's something that's interesting folks if you have a car in storage don't start a dog run for a few seconds and shut it off every day I mean and the reason being because this is not allowing any moisture to get out of the oil we're diluting the oil and basically it's like now we're running a car with water in the oil pan yeah water in the oil pan nothing's coming up to temperatures so everything's at the wrong clearances I mean I've seen an engine go through a season and a half of Formula Drift and look better than this thing I mean you remember some of the things were fused some of the bearings were even fused together yeah like the bearings are fused to the crank every single bearing was totally ruined the only reason why it didn't spin is because it was just idling but the bearing material was hammered the cylinder walls were hammered the Pistons and the Rings they're like wasted like I mean I wouldn't have believed it until I saw it right agreed so um so what this customer wanted was something that was like a stock LS3 that would have a smooth idle look stock externally but would have like a lot of torque and a wide power band so we built him something that's optimized to produce torque to look totally stock and to have a smooth idle and what that translates to as well guys it's basically just a refresh of an engine with getting the most efficiency and power out of those constraints of the stock constraints without going too crazy with heavy Machining or heavy porting of heads or anything like that and it had to run on California 91 pump gas exactly so let's start uh the the heart of any of Ls build is the block so we start here usually with a bare brand new LS3 block you could potentially bring in your own if you wanted to and we can inspect it here and see if we can work with that uh well but if you for if we example had to order a brand new Blog the brand new blog from Chevy is 1900 on this particular motor we're able to save the block but they did need to get reboards so we re-boarded at 10 over you you can't really uh borrow LS3 much over than much more than that but I mean seriously this thing the the bars are ruined and this engine had zero use miles but uh we boarded 10 over we used our normal really good Machining so we did it with um with torque plates so the board Distortion would uh stay uh stay good like all Motors when you Bolt the cylinder head on the Chevys the act of like torquing down the head actually distorts the bore so the torque plate acts like it acts like the cylinder head actually but it has holes in some of the Machine Tools could go in so you stress the block just like you would in use with a the torque plate which is the dummy cylinder head bolted on you board and hone it so that way when you Bolt the cylinder head on for reals you'll have a perfectly round bore absolutely and whether you're getting the work done with us guys or with some another shop be sure that they're using door plates when they're Machining your blocks now the other thing we did is properly finish the cylinder walls a lot of the shops mess this up uh like Modern Performance Rings don't like a rough cylinder wall finish so we did a like a diamond home 600 grit like our one of the finest ones you can get it but the important trick is we did plateau honing after that plateauhoning kind of uh takes the pointy Peaks off the hone's surface this way the rain seat really quick it also has lower friction and lower wear and it's another step a lot of shops don't don't take so proper Machining and proper honing is really important so the fee for us to do that for you guys is eleven hundred dollars and that what that will include is the born hone it will also include the obviously boring holding with the torque plate and then resurfacing if you need more things along the lines of like let's say we need to align board the mains or something along those lines and that'll be an additional fee but for this purposes we're just doing just the basic Machining eleven hundred bucks align boring is uh let's say you have a engine that's been used really really hard everything moves around including the the main bearing bore sometimes those can get like out of shape like get egg shaped or out of positions so basically a line boring you shave the Caps just a little bit and then um you run a you run a home right through there and it strains out and uh makes your your main bars all nice and round again well we try to avoid it LS engines are really good they have four bolt Mains and they're cross bolted so you generally don't see it in ls's too much but um hey we check it on every single engine we build so uh it it probably won't need to be done on LS but you never know then after we're done with the block then the next thing is the crank and rods uh for our setup again like we mentioned earlier we're trying to basically get the most power out of the constraints that we're working with and we went with the stroker setup from Eagle correct uh yes like our customer wanted a sleeper torqueer motor so we built him our 418 cubic inch combo so this is like a 10 over block um a four inch stroke and uh that gives you 418 cubic inches which is a lot for that tiny package it's only um you know it's nine less than LS7 for instance 9 cubic inches but uh our secret sauce like uh you know we could do it at expensive parts or uh Value parts so we went with value parts on this motor so we used an an eagle crank it's made out of 4340 which is a high nickel High chromium steel that's really tough perfect for cranks um it's a machine from a um like a blank forging out of that and I mean even though Eagle is a fairly uh it I wouldn't say cheap brand but it's not like the most expensive one very affordable we've always had the measure out perfectly we've had some of these Eagle cranks and like super abusive conditions like Pro drift cars and they hold up just fine and we also do like to go with the ESP armor from Eagle correct yeah that's a ESP armor is a process that eagle does it's like an option it basically makes everything super shiny like Chrome um that gives you more fatigue strength less windage losses sheds oil reduces friction on the bearing journals plus it looks cool so ESP armor is a cool feature that we do for some customers if they want it um we use uh Eagle connecting rods for this sort of build they're made out of the same tough High nickel chromium alloy they're a uh they're a forging machined in the USA and they use ARP 2000 bolts their I-beam construction they have a lot of cool little features like uh this little rib you can see in here I guess they found through analysis that that actually gives a lot of strength even though that's a little thing um the the small one has dual pin Oilers so you can see there's two uh oiling holes like down here a lot of Brands put their oiling hole up at top and up here it's the most one of the most highly stressed parts of the rod and uh you know if you drill a hole in there you're weakening it right so it's still one big hole up here they put two little holes down in here where um you know like the the beam can give it stiffness so that's a little trick hide silicone bronze bushing you know like these are fairly inexpensive rods but they're damn good like we've never had a bit of trouble like in our super like abusive condition we might get their optional raw um rod with the uh oh the better Hardware yeah with the ARP 625 volts but ARP 2000 is more than strong enough for um probably up to thousand horsepower maybe um but you do have that option so that brings us to a good question with all things being equal um is there any reason why a customer shouldn't go with our Long Rod stroker setup um well I think if they're concerned about fuel economy maybe okay and uh or if they're racing in a class where you can't do that or um uh there isn't too many drawbacks um well I guess there's some that we've kind of countered with the way we put things together like one of the things is when you stroke a LS block um the skirt of the Piston can actually poke out beyond the board oh yeah and you get this weird um wavy wear patterns in the bore so um you know it's our belief that we you should never go beyond the four inch stroke with a stock LS block for that reason um I get some of the other things we do is we use a longer than stock Rod so we run this 6 125 rod and that's about the longest that we can stuff in the ls and not disrupt the ring package too much and still have um you know enough uh ring line thickness there the longer rod uh causes less dig into the cylinder walls which is an important uh with the stroke because the stroke tends to cause that to happen more thrust load um on the sides of the bore so we're lessening the travel of the piston and that's why there's not no it's uh it's a longer Rod so like the sine wave of like piston speed per uh degree of crank rotation well let's put it to normal people language and as this is moving up and down in the cylinders what is the Long Rod doing it causes less angularity if you have the short Rod it would be like like this and there would be really scrubbing into the walls but the longer Rod is more like this you know of course this is super exaggerated um but uh but that that's a good visualization of what the longer Rod is doing and with the Long Rod the Piston accelerates away from TDC a little bit slower like the sine curve of the Piston velocity is more rounded instead of pointy so it dwells up there a little bit so it dwells up there a little bit longer it puts less stress on the rod bolts and the Piston pin um and the rod so it's a little bit less stress and also you get a little bit longer time to fill the cylinders so it helps your V be a little bit and also the explosion on the power stroke has more time to kind of impinge on the top of the piston and transfer that energy yes the Piston starts to go down so it helps efficiency a little bit so you have less mechanical stress less friction a little bit more volumetric efficiency and a little bit more thermal efficiency okay now when there you had originally mentioned the slight decrease in MPG now what is that a function of uh just having the bigger engine oh okay yeah so for that oh the stroker portion of it and yeah gotcha okay so with that said now you're probably asking what are the price for this at least for the combo that we talked about which is the eagle crank with the foreign stroke and then also our longer Eagle rods the crank is 950 and the rod set is 550. now of course there are thousands of options guys that you can buy so you can assume that the price of your Rod setup or even your crank will likely be right around the same price range so after that let's move on to our Pistons which we're using je FSR pistons and the ultra Pistons yeah we're running the je Ultra Pistons the ultra Pistons are cool because they come with a ceramic thermal Bearer coating on the top and anti-friction coating on the side um they also um have premium features like the FSR piston configuration so it's kind of like a here let me show you it's like a kind of like a slipper skirt but then the thrust side is is wider than the non-thrust side so um you get more area where you need it you know the thrust side is where the Piston gets pushed into the cylinder wall so having like a little thin guy is going to wear out and put more Point contact loading but uh you you have the wide skirt where you need it and on the side that's not loaded so much it's narrow so it's less weight less friction uh the FSR forging also has these flying buttresses here that uh couple the pin boss into the whole rest of the Piston okay like a lot of Pistons uh their slipper skirt like this don't have this so there's like a the combustion pressure just kind of pushes and tends to distort the Piston like that um these slime buttresses help keep everything nice and uh you know keeps the loading even the pin box is the most highly stressed part of the piston and pin boss failure is a issue on like highly stressed engines so all this stuff reinforces the pin box so even though everything is all milled down and lightweight the pin boss area is still really strong um the ultra Pistons have like a near net shape foraging so it doesn't require uh much secondary Milling on the bottom or anything and because of this you get really good grain flow um so the grain flows all around in here a lot of forged pistons are just like a forged chunk of aluminum with a lot of CNC Machining but on this thing is like almost squished into the shape it's going to be so you get all that forged good grain flow good grain refinement goodness and grain going in the direction of stress and all I hear what you're saying you're not starting off this way with a block a cube like a cube like almost squished into the almost final shape yeah so you get the the grain flow so grain is kind of like grain in the wood and you like you can snap wood across the grain super easy but if you like pull on the grain it's really strong right so when you get a near-net shape forging like this the grain of the metal is going on the right direction for the most strength gotcha um one cool thing about this piston too is the skirt profiles designed specifically for the four inch stroke in the ls block because you notice the skirts are really short so these skirts won't go beyond the bottom of the bore so you don't get that uncontrolled rocking and the cam of the Piston is designed trying to control that rocking while it's in the bore the cam is a kind of like this shape when it's really exaggerated so it kind of helps ease the Piston around the core so even though these are pretty short looking skirts you'll still get good stability in the bore and you won't get that rocking thing so uh you you've probably seen the rocking wear and some customer engines that we refresh the racing motors again this is uh Jay's answer to control a lot of that um since we're running a longer Rod they had to put the uh the the pin bar right into the oil ring if you notice that we have the additional support rail on our ring package yeah so they have that thin support rail um and uh you know like we we've done this in kind of a lot of Motors that we've done the Long Rod combo and we've never had a problem with oil consumption or anything so you know it looks kind of scary but I think that's a that's a good deal um other cool features is the FSR piston has these lateral gas ports so this helps some of that combustion pressure get behind the number one ring the ring is a really low tension really thin ring but this helps get the gas pressure behind there and helps rain seal the high RPM it has this pressure accumulation Groove between the number one and number two compression Rings this also helps get uh acts like a reservoir for pressure to help pressurize the number two ring and help that thing seal too and it has this support ring Oil ring that we talked about um some other Advanced features are the Piston has a twin Oilers so these two holes here get oil that's great from the cylinder wall by the oil ring they actually kind of pressure feed it into the Piston pin so this helps keep this area really well lubricated it's twin Oilers with this lateral Groove the groove acts like a reservoir to hold some of that oil in so you're not going to have any problems with the Piston pin seizing uh the Rings it's number one ring is a super thin lightweight steel ring with uh it's nitrited nitrite it is a process that converts the surface of uh a ferrous metal to iron nitride which is almost like a hard slippery ceramic the second ring is ductal iron but it's a Naper profile so it has kind of like a hook on it that little hook thing wears into the bore really quick and breaks in super fast and gives like good backup seal to the number one ring um yeah this is like a really trick piston and you know what's even better is Je has these things on on the shelf and on a great valley man I mean I think it's only 9.65 for the setup for this piston set yeah it's like maybe a hundred bucks more than uh just their yeah for the additional features that you get right off the box I mean the Coatings the FSR design yeah it's a slam dunk I mean yeah this is used to be a custom spec piston that you would have to wait wait a few weeks to get made but I mean here it is on the shelf and and one question I'm sure some of you may have that are familiar with their videos and our processes here is well what about WPC and cryo treatment for these Pistons they're already all coated and everything well there are additional things you can do I mean for the most part it is a pretty right out of the box you can use piston but for our super trick builds for example we can take the additional step of wpcing the pin area in the pin itself so what we would do is um WPC and the pin board the WPC the pin we'd mask the Piston off so we wouldn't take off the Coatings and we WPC in the area of the Rings most importantly we WPC and the ring grooves because you know micro welding of the Rings is always a problem especially like in boosted engines micro welding is like fretting when you get a piece of metal and rub it really hard into another metal under heat and pressure and maybe a little lack of oil the the two metal surfaces tend to uh weld into each other or Gall into each other and it's on the small scale and that's called um micro welding and when you get micro welding of your compression Rings they kind of stick and you lose a lot of ring seal and power so at wdpc does is like it really works to prevent the micro welding so if it keeps the Rings moving freely and keeps your engine making power and of course it's all per application if your engine is going to depending on what you're going to be using it for and also you know speed is money how much how fast do you want to go it's always what we say and durability too absolutely I mean like what I always talk about is how um you know like a race motor with forged pistons and all that is a lot stronger than the stock motor but it's not always longer lasting from this point yes yeah because of the metals that you're using and a lot of maybe explain that the reason between the forged pistons and your regular stock Pistons well like your stock Pistons generally nowadays is what you call a hypertechtic alloy and it's like really high silicon and uh that's good it doesn't expand much so you can keep tight clearances so you don't have much rattling around that helps with wear the silicone is like kind of like a hard element within the aluminum Matrix so that highly resists wear it's also pretty good good for friction the only drawback with that is it's super brittle so turbo boost tight compression any kind of detonation will kill those Pistons right now how do they compare Weight Wise so hypertechtic is a little bit less dense so the Piston's kind of lighter but you know they're generally full skirt and not all like paired down okay so the weight is pretty equivalent plus hypertechnic isn't as strong so you need to have more material around the pin box and stuff for instance so that weight savings and material are 101 kind of is out it balances out by the amount that you're gonna have to add more material anyway usually like an ultra piston will be lighter than any stock piston but um you know like the race Pistons made out of uh 2618 and that's a low silicone alloy um you know it's ductile it's tough flexible it's really strong but it's also kind of soft and almost gummy so it's not going to wear like a hyperative piston so like you know like if you have old Toyota to 300 000 half a million miles out of those sometimes but if you have like all forged race motor if you get a hundred thousand on the street that's pretty good so there's the difference between uh wearability and strength something to think about when you're making up your builds guys now something that we don't uh that there's really not something that we cut any corners on or bearings like any of our other builds we mostly try to use King Racing for basically had great luck with them and in this case we'll be using their coated line of bearings uh yeah the king coated bearings um they're coating like most other companies is usually some kind of polymer uh usually it's uh molybdenum in the resin Matrix or something like that but uh Kings is a little different like they they have some polymer in there for slippiness but they also have a part of copper nanoparticles now copper is a really lubricous kind of metal and the nanoparticles are really really tiny and they're almost like little um solid foam lubricant things okay and and so the the king coating instead of just giving some slurpiness actually increases the bearing capacity of the of the the load bearing capacity of the bearing like maybe you know up to ten percent nice and uh generally uh most Coatings don't increase the load bearing capacity at all uh we really like King bearings uh we've had engines that have seen like a season of tough use we tear them down and the bearings are still okay which is really unusual now for your for your build is your budget about 300 for bearings and that's for your Mains and your connecting rods depending on how things work out we may have to buy another set of mains or rods if we need to go with a standard size mix them up with maybe an oversized it just depends on when the clearances fall for your build but you know you uh the way it breaks down is actually 134 the mains and 160 for the rods at this time um like right now with supply chain issues uh you know sometimes you might have to substitute bearings or you might be waiting six months for bearings and I'm not joking either yeah where we're having a complete engine bill just sitting around for one set of bearings or or one part it actually any of these parts in this entire build LS Parts have been becoming very hard to get recently yeah covid's a but you know if we can't get King we'll still use ACL or we'll use clevite those are all very very good bearings um and one of the things we about ACL and Cleveland is you can actually WPC them and when you WPC those bearings the load bearing capacity can go up like 20 percent so that's an option with King with the coding WPC might damage the coating so we don't do that but uh you could still get a really good combo uh WPC and should we have to use a non-coated bearing right for bearing clearances um some LSS like ls3s or ls7s have alloy blocks and these engines if you're on the forums and stuff or you have much experience they always run really low oil pressure and to us like maybe that's fine with close to stock power but if you're running serious power and you're running um under tough conditions uh you know that's not acceptable we like to see uh higher oil pressure so one of the things we do is we still select fit the bearings and we make it mix and match different bearing sets to get the clearance so we can run like on the tighter side of stock this helps prevent the loss of oil pressure like what happens if you have an alloy block is they expand a lot with heat it expands and you lose some of your clearance and then the oil pressure drops and it's something we see like for almost with any alloy block when uh used hard like something like drifting or road racing where everything gets gets really hot um if it's a really high horsepower like a turbo motor um we might not tighten up the clearances because on those High horsepower motors things move around and uh you know you can actually damage the bearings if you're running too tight because your crank and your block and everything are flexing but generally if it's a hot n a motor or a mild turbo or supercharger motor we run things tighter I guess when you get to a certain power level and you have to loosen up the clearings the clearances about the only thing that'll keep the engine lubricated right is it dry so they're trying something but that's when you're getting into four-digit power there the other thing we do is we run a high volume oil pump so there's all kinds of oil pumps you can run but if you have a serious pretty serious LS build we run the melling high volume pump for the uh the VVT motor so this has like about 20 percent more than the normal mailings high volume pump and it's about 50 percent more volume than your stock pump and it's about 20 psi more pressure so this kind of helps handle some of the lack of oil um one of the things when you run the big a pump this big I mean this is the second best thing you can get to dry sump is it could suck your oil pan dry so your stock oil pump is I mean your stock oil pans probably no bueno you have to have a high capacity pan and windage tray and a crank scraper to get all that oil back um I guess another one of these things about the regular LS blocks is that they're non-priority means so that means they have their main oil Galley then they feed the top end and the bottom end of the engine from there like these aftermarket racing blocks like this rhs one down there have what you call Priority Mains so it feeds the main bearings first and then takes the bleed oil from the mains and the oils to the top in that's the way to go for a Performance Engine but with the non-priority means having a sufficient of volume and pressure oil pump it's really it's amazing yeah because you're not feeding the mains directly and mailings does have different options as to the oil pressures and even like Mike said a high volume or a normal volume one depending on your application whether you're not going to go with an aftermarket pan you're probably necessarily may not want to go with a super high volume bump um but one of the things a lot of engine builders that uh you know all the good ones know this but a lot of the like your local shopka kind of guys they don't know about that non-priority Main and uh yeah they might they might not set your clearances up right and not give you enough uh oil pump volume and if they do they might not know about the pan not holding enough so um sometimes it kind of helps to go with people that have a little bit more experience with actual racing indeed and to finish off with the pricing of the mailing pumps about 175 for the high volume high pressure pump again they do have other options any range around the same price um less uh then also not lastly but also let's talk about hardware for our engine which is we get it for ARP for both our Mains and our heads uh yeah uh you know like this engine is like kind of like stock plus um you know it's not crazy stock compression sure it's a stroker and kind of big cubic inch but we're running the uh Factory torque to yield bolts and when you're building an engine that's not too crazy that doesn't need total um ceiling like um you know even kind of a healthy naturally aspirated engine uh tortilla bolts actually have some advantages like um when you put like a solid ARP stud in there um you know that thing's solid and the aluminum block the coefficient of expansion of aluminum is twice that of a solid stud so as the block heats up and grows and the head heats up and grows it's growing twice as fast as that stud so you're actually getting um like more Point stress you're getting more board Distortion uh you're not putting such an even clamp load on your head gasket depending on the temp your operating temperature yeah so the torque to yield bolts are kind of designed to have some spraying and to kind of like allow that growth without so much Distortion of the block that's why the oems use it but the bad thing about those is that you can only reuse them maybe once and then they permanently stretch and lose their stuff and that's another thing that engine builders that maybe don't know what they're doing so much do they keep reusing the bolts next you know you have your head lifting or you even pull the threads out of the block or something um but the studs um you know like I kind of say only need the studs if you if you need them so you know like a serious like seeing them in a boost in like on a boosted engine or a serious naturally aspirated you know like 13-1 um and uh you know high RPM super abusive and uh in that case you know like the the clamping load and all that the studs is what is what will get you through you know even though some of the other things it's a little compromise your ring seal might not be as good and um you know you have that point load consideration so you might have to do more exotic things to like um like o-ring your your block or something but uh it's generally only needs studs when you use studs when you need them okay studs are always good for the mains though but for the heads you know there's always that consideration all right so with that said your LSA are P studs were about 235 then if you really do need the head stud that's another 335. um then after that let's get into our you know the regular prices for your for your short blog which are the parts that you really need your Chevy gasket kit for all the gaskets that come in and rebuild you should budget about 300 for that and then there's also two little pieces that we get that are uh Billet pieces which is for the oil pickup brace and then also the um the little oil diverse things usually made out of plastic yeah well you call it a thing I think it isn't all I think they some people call the dog bone thing but yeah it's the oil diver plunger looking thing thing yeah you gotta get that so we get that made out of billets so both of those fees are 25 each and they're just good insurance I mean again that little plunger thing could if it breaks and could really ruin your day um for head gaskets we really like these uh Pro seal gaskets uh je sells them uh they're at MLS multi-layer stainless so they're made out of stainless steel with some bossing and they have like a little little extra layer in there to put more clamp around the cylinders they're coated with some kind of polymer coating so it helps conform into like some of your Machining marks on your deck and it's a nice gasket for a good price if you wanted to get really serious like uh there's more exotic gaskets to be had like let's say you're running a forced induction with like a folded stopper layer and stuff like comedic makes some of that but those are way more money so for a build like this this is uh which is a way more than adequate gasket so naturally aspirated um not boosting too much these are a great gasket and a great value and the GE Pro steel head gaskets are coming in at 140 each unless I have two two sides on a V8 so 280 you should budget for um and then from there we'll go into really what makes a big difference in the performance of the engine your power band is the camshaft and we've had we've been normally using some Comp Cams they have they have a lot of options and not only that they also even come with a master kit which includes your your or the timing gear to the the chain for it so it just makes it really easy and a nice little package what we like about Comp Cams is you know like modern said they have good value packages that are all together with match components for like Street engines this particular engine the owner wanted the smooth idle so we have a cam that is only a little bigger than stock it mostly has almost the stock duration but uh like a healthier amount of lift and the lobe separation angle which makes that lumpy idle is almost the same as stock so it's like I would say even the Chevy performance 525 cam is bigger than this one but it's a nice mild cam like one up from stock but uh what we like about comp is that they have a grind for almost everything and when they're doing they're really willing to work with us and make custom grinds for a special spec engines like we had for the form of the drift engine we had like a big single turbo it has a little bit more back pressure than maybe like a twin so I had them make a custom grind with a little bit more lobe separation but you know they're really willing to work with us they make they can make a custom grind first so if you have that special engine the special requirements we can get the perfect cam from them and they have quick turnaround and again guys they make a really nice complete kits for the cam and the master kit for the cam is about two thousand dollars now of course if you wanted to stick with the stock cam just keep in mind that you'll have to go you'll have to also make sure that you add it for the lifters valve springs retainers valve seals things of that sort that come with the kit already so that's pretty much you should always change the timing chain too yeah absolutely and that and that comes with it it's the gear and the chains that come with the kit that is pretty much the bulk of the parts so if we're to add up everything we've talked about here that we are about eight thousand dollars for that and then we'll get into the basics of the labor which is our engine assembly which is about forty eight hundred dollars then we're looking at balancing of the internal assembly which is your Pistons rods um and crank that's another 150 bucks and lastly we have what we talked about in the beginning of the video at the machine shop that's about eight hundred dollars for basic Machining which is the boring of the engine of the block and then and also resurfacing the The Mating surfaces for the heads now if there is additional machine that needs to be done for example the day line boring that we talked about there is an additional feat for that but we can talk about that once we've already have your block in hand and have inspected it um so with that said really then we can get into heads uh let me finish off by saying that for your basic rebuild if we wanted to do a basic head refresh that is about eleven hundred dollars that does not include changing of for example your valve guides which are the gold guys here that's really what's controlling the shaft play but we but we will be replacing the valve seals again that's eleven hundred dollars but now we do have two different head setups here which is just your stock head that came with your LS3 e-rod and then an All-Pro all-out head and I'll switch sides here with Mike so he can kind of explain the differences between the two so for this customer you know like he doesn't want huge power he just basically wants something pretty close to stock and that's reliable and you know the whole engine was screwed up but the heads were still kind of okay so he basically did is went in and did our basic uh or our trick new and radius valve job uh you know this helps probably on the V8 it probably gives 50 horsepower um the new and valve job it cuts like a nice radius from the combustion chamber to the 45 and the smooth radius into the valve ball so that it actually matches the valve seat to the to the bowl of the port it's almost like match doing Bowl work when porting it probably gives like maybe two-thirds of the gain of a fully ported Bowl just in the valve job so we like doing that we can also do a good three angle valve job with a sturdy valve machine that's a little cheaper you know it's still a solid valve job that's going to give you some power um you know there's options if you want we could uh hand blend the uh the the the top cut into the the the we can hand blend the combustion chamber into your top cut and then your 70 degree bottom cut we can blend that into the bowl and we can uh clean up the short side radius of the port that probably gives you about 75 or 70 75 percent of the advantages of a full fully ported head for a fraction of the cost oh we didn't do that to this because the owner didn't want to go crazy um but that's like options on the stock head other options are we can get your head CNC ported although we kind of almost don't recommend that because you can get really good aftermarket heads that uh you know actually have a really good flowing ports um so if it's a not too esoteric motor like our 650 horsepower motor that you might have seen the video um we like tff tsf uh heads for the those kind of things because of a stock configuration head that's one of the best flowing ones and it's a really nice price so I always feel like that's a really good bang for the buck ahead and you know we make 650 horsepower pretty easy naturally aspirated with that head so those are the options for your stock your stock heads that we can do for the purposes of this pricing what we've done is just in basic new and valve job it did not need new valve guides that was all actually in good condition so just the new and valve job is the 1100 we talked about so that puts us at a grand total of about 14 000 for our budget build so what that will include is new block all the parts necessary aftermarket parts and stock parts and the stock heads with the new and valve job so 14 Grand for the budget LS long block now we'll get into some of the more expensive parts for our more baller builds uh well I guess another thing too is that you know like even though this is uh kind of a budget build it's still a stroke or crank it's still a brand new block um you could probably actually like if you didn't want to stroke it that's a lot less money like let's say somebody just has a Vortec on their car right and they just want pistons and rods and the solid rebuild to handle the Boost right and they're maybe running 14 pounds of boost we can just do pistons and rods uh good bearings and it would be a lot less and with what Mike just mentioned that is completely correct so you can really take what we talked about regarding labor and then put any combination of parts that you want to use and you'll have a perfectly good idea what your Reba will cost labor weather we're using aftermarket Pistons or aftermarket rods or stock block or stock cams that's all going to toss the exact same amount of money to put together there are some items that cost more when you're going out to off the market but we'll talk about that as Mike talks about the more developed head program so you know that's our Basics but if you want to get um like something special we get into the realm of kind of esoteric so like let's say you wanted to do a Max effort and a motor I mean I think it's a bit much of a cylinder head to go for Force induction I don't think generally you need to go this crazy unless you really had to go this crazy but um for like an all-out n a motor we like to use all pro heads now these are some of the best flowing LS heads on the market um see they have so many cool things like they have copper beryllium valve seats they have like huge ports they're all cfd design they have a really good fast combustion chamber with a lot of the clinch they change the valve angles so the valves are canted see the the ports can get a better shot at the combustion chamber there's a lot of cool things in these they're expensive and they use kind of a non-standard rocker system so and they use a non-standard valve stem like the valve stems smaller than standard so you have to get non-standard valves non-standard retainers non-standard Keepers and kind of a non-standard rocker system like uh maybe you can order a special order from jezel or Crower and that you have to say oh I need the All-Pro rocker arm configuration and these heads will be for all out naturally aspirated effort or all out anything but mostly naturally aspirated if you have a head like a like an rhs head or a TFS head that's all based on stock Chevy architecture so it uses Chevy configuration rockers Chevy configuration valves and valve lengths Chevy configuration Springs so if that motor messes up you can get parts anywhere but this All-Pro stuff is you have to get from All Pro or uh you know the valves have to be made from uh from a valve manufacturer um yeah it's not easy to place on Parts yeah I mean all pro could fix these all day and they have the parts but you have one part supplier versus many and you have something that's off the shelf and this is a little bit Tweaky but if you wanted to build like a super sick like a 900 horsepower na LS we'd be using these suckers and those suckers go for forty seven hundred dollars for the pair by the way but uh yeah it's all in the head basically and once you get to a certain point um but that's kind of beyond the scope of what we're doing uh for what most people want to spend but it's all doable yep uh we talked about dry sump systems once you get to certain power level especially uh big Power turbo Motors where you have to run the bigger clearances about the only thing that'll keep those things lubed is a good dry sump like we use daily in the daily dry sums between seven and maybe seven to nine thousand dollars depending on how many stages and but that's a badass system um it's all integrated into the pan and it's nice and clean and works super awesome now while we're talking about heads and we get away from heads let's quickly touch on one the roller lifters that we can do the upgrade with and then also what you had mentioned the the shaft rocker setup too um that's another thing um a mild engine like this we use a hydraulic roller cam we use like a performance hydraulic roller um I guess one of the main things is that we use like a low lash hydraulic roller lifter low lash means that um the hydraulic latch adjusting part doesn't have that much travel one of the disadvantages to a hydraulic system you don't have to worry about adjusting your valves right but then that hydraulic cushion part like on the stock roller lifter when you get the high RPM you're getting close to valve float the lifter is pump up and that chamber fills all the way up with oil and then the valves don't close all the way and then you start getting misfires and valve flows it's not fast enough for the valve chain speed yeah so when you get like a really radical cam profiles and high RPM changes the RPM you have to go to like a solid lifter Cam and that's like a mechanical lifter where it's solid and there's none of the hydraulic stuff you have to adjust the Lash so the year people talk about solid lift your cam that's what it is so for our more high performance builds especially our drift Motors we go to a like a solid solid lifter we also go to like roller rockers roller rockers instead of having a sliding trunnion they have a needle bearings uh it's a lot less friction and the motion ratio stays consistent throughout the stroke um you also get more valve train stability you probably get about 20 or 30 horsepower less friction um and for our Extreme Motors like the Formula Drift ones where they're banging off the rev limiter RPMs changing the drift cars when they hook it sometimes the engine almost wants to spin backwards um puts a lot of stress on the valve train we use what's called a shaft rocker the shaft rock or the Rockers are in the shaft so they can't rotate and skid off the valves the other thing is if you're running kind of something a casting with a really high Port like an LS7 type port or even ls3s do this a really radical cam puts so much stress on the studs that it actually cracks the um The Rocker boss into the intake port and we've seen that a lot on like drift Motors so the shaft rocker actually spreads the load out over uh several pedestals so I've never seen a shaft rock or crack into the intake port so that's important for extreme use so extreme use would be drifting for sure road racing uh boat motors so high RPM situations yeah a boat motor is another severe case you know the engines at full load full sand all the time but then when the boat bounces and the prop comes out of the water the Reds Shoot To the Moon and it's bouncing off the rev limiter and then when it comes back it comes down it goes huh and it catches and puts all kinds of stress on everything almost like a sand rail too I guess when we're taking sweet jumps or off-road racing trucks uh so drifting off-road racing boats they put like like drag racing there's almost nothing because that's only a few seconds uh road racing you're on the throttle for like you know like minutes Bonneville you're on the throttle for minutes um road racing the engine has to hold up for maybe a couple hours every day and do that twice in the race weekend so you know these are serious Motors that really have to be well thought out I guess that's another thing right that we keep on you know on YouTube and the Comets someone goes well I can build a Ebay boat or they'll put out 1500 horsepower and you guys are full of crap but it's like for how long yeah a dino pole a couple of blasts on the street maybe a quick freeway pull that's not real racing that's just screwing around you know we we build our stuff to to to to ask not only that with our LS program we've actually proved it now with many different builds uh Street bills uh track builds drift builds all the way from amateur to professional levels yeah so like those YouTube commenters um you know we'd like to see you never heard of them even racing because you know there's stuff wouldn't even last a couple laps including on the street doesn't count yep um so with all those details of the heads uh just to give you an idea of what these costs are before actually before we total that up it's not about the the last part of the process or an important part of the process that we do with a lot of our high performance builds and what sets apart the budget and the baller builds is the cryo and the wtpc treatment now you've heard of us talk about both of these treatments on many different videos you can go back on the search and you know look for WPC videos look for our cryo treatment videos uh the cost to do the boars crank Pistons Rings rods cam and valve springs for WPC is 27.50 for the same Parts but cryo treatment is twenty three hundred dollars so that is a big cost difference so once we add up the head you know high performance head options with the high performance cam the roller Rock the shaft rocker system and even the the mechanical lifters and you're looking now more at your at your build being closer to twenty eight thousand dollars as opposed to our budget bills it's closer to 1314. I guess some of the things about that is uh you know if you're really racing um and you know when you're racing it's not just the cost of the car but it's the cost to transport the car someplace it's your entry fee it's the cost to transport your crew out there um fuel costs food costs lodging costs time time uh it all adds up and the dnf is super super costly and a lot of times when dnf can cost your whole your whole season um so it's like the the a minor cost when it's stuff like that and we've generally seen like erase more like like one of our race voters can last a season of Pretty Tough racing but it's pretty used up at the end of the season but with WPC and cryo a lot of times um that same motor can go a season and a half even and most of the time it just needs a little refresh a little bear and refresh maybe even just a ring package refresh and they're good to go um you know a lot of times too is that like a lot of other engine builders uh they go to two two three four engines a season and you know we we never had any of our engines last less than one I don't think and what Mike and our talking about again are professional racing efforts um but for your everyday build it's the same thing though I mean yes you don't have the cost of crude necessarily but it sucks to go through the process of putting your car on a trailer going to the track driving to the track and then all of a sudden your day is over because of a minor incident and that that's where this is really the insurance that you're purchasing when you're buying these processes for your engine builds so if you have a serious effort I mean you're spending a minimum of 10 grand just to be there the cost is just exponential compared to the novice guy yeah yeah and uh you know like when you compare it to your transportation costs and your entry fee and all that that's a big investment and if that gets thrown away that's that's a significant significant loss there another thing we also have to talk about and the big difference between your baller and your budget builds is what you're starting off with in your with your block uh the difference between your stock LS3 block and your higher performance sorry types block that is meant to take a lot more horsepower so let's take a look at those so when we're talking about uh really cool builds like really big Power um the stock LS3 block starts to get a little bit inadequate um the stock LS3 block is probably good for maybe something like 14 pounds of boost and uh maybe about 800 horsepower for long-term use some of the reasons for that is it only has four bolts around the cylinder so head ceiling becomes a problem also it's kind of thin wall and moves around a bit there's some guys that claim they get 1400 horsepower out of these but I challenge them to how long can they do it and that's not oh I run mine hard on the street all day because that's not really running your car hard but if you're actually out there actually racing actually doing stuff for real it's not going to hold at that power level so the limitations are about 800 horsepower 14 pounds of boost now if you want to go more than that you got to go to a aftermarket block so we use rhs this is our rhs block we'd also use Dart or a couple other manufacturers we really like Dart too uh the main advantage of Dart is it's uh beefier than the rhs could take a little bit more power but it it weighs a little more this is our HS block here that we just happened to have lying around if you want all the details of this rhs block go to our 1400 horsepower LS video we'll have the link around here someplace and I talk about every little thing about this block but I'll just give you the quick Story one of the main advantages of this block rhs or the Dart Block is you have more bolts per cylinder getting more clamp load this block you have your four bolts like your normal LS but you also have two more here and here so you you have six bolts to really get good clamp on that head gasket can hold a lot more boost another Advantage is the deck is a lot thicker the deck is thicker it Flex less less it supports the head gasket better you're less likely to blow a gasket there this block has a really thick iron liner like the ls you can only borrow it about 10 over this thing it comes at 4125 and you can board all the way up to four one six five um so we've built engines as big as um 400 477 cubic inches out of these and they were sweet another quick Advantage is the um the deck height is a is an inch higher than stock uh this enables us to run like a like up to a four and a quarter stroke but we can run a super long Rod so the stroke to Rod length ratio stays good and the Piston speed and the and the piston angularity and all that dig and stuff stays under control uh having the the stroke and the Long Rod is crucial for a long life a lot of other engine builders don't do that but that's one of the things we do in our big stroker engines uh the block is more beefy in general uh there's more beef around the mains and all that so there's uh less Flex what we like about the Dart Block is it has even more beef down there when you get into the four digit power level and you start getting you know hammering these things with maybe 1200 horsepower we've seen the main caps fret so that's when the Dart Block starts to become something you might want to think about uh if you're going big Power like maybe 2000 and more uh the aluminum block probably gets kind of iffy so then we'd be looking at the LSX type block which is something like this but it's made out of iron but has all the same features the tall deck and the bolts and everything also when you get to this level of uh build for crankshafts we start looking at the really high-end Billet crankshafts like Calis and for rods we look at stuff like Carrillo or Calis those are like our high-end super good rods another thing at this level is it's all about the money this LS3 block is 1900 bucks and this rhs block is 6400 bucks and I consider that a deal for what you're getting but you know it's all about the money you want to make big horsepower need money to play so all the costs that we've gone over today both for baller and our budget builds are basically for a long block none of these include the cost of for example valve covers or even with the mechanical lifters you're going to require much taller valve valve covers as well or oil pans for example we haven't discussed that and most importantly for a lot of you swap guys we haven't talked about the accessory drives it's in a whole different topics or intake manifold or intake manifolds or any of those accessories that go so again just Salon box is the only thing that we're discussing as far as the pricing goes here guys now if you need more details yes you can reach out to us please know that we get hundreds of emails and engine requests so unless you're really serious we're probably not necessarily going to take the time of giving you an itemized list of every part that you need for your build and we'll just refer you back to this video so please understand that other than that that is pretty much all we have for the ls build um guys if you like this content you want to see more of our videos you want to see more engine stuff by all means please subscribe subscribe subscribe tell all your friends and we will see you next time for our next engine video come back to rage your moto IQ nice

Channel: MotoIQ

Views: 176,670

Keywords: motoiq, LS1, LS2, LS3, Engine build, cost, pricing, heads, camshaft, machining, bore, head work, headwork, head gasket, engine builder

Id: mSXXTt5emww

Length: 63min 21sec (3801 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023