Re: The Terry Burtz 5 main bearing engine blocks are back on track.
Steve Hackle, thank you for your post.
Your experiences mirror mine exactly with trying to have something made in the USA.
When I started this project more than 10 years ago and wanted to keep it in the USA, my quote for foundry tooling was more than $150,000.
The current quote for tooling in China is in the $40,000 range.
My USA foundry experiences have led me to believe that the bigger problem is the lack of knowledgable engineers, lack of knowledgable workers, and lack of quality control in the foundries that I attempted to use. Foundries that I am familiar with do not use procedures to assemble cores, make molds, or pour iron.
In today's market and my experiences, USA foundries would rather cast manhole covers which are much easier to cast than cylinder blocks because there is little need to follow a procedure or have quality control when casting manhole covers.
The factory in China that we are working with specializes in making cylinder blocks, heads, connecting rods, and crankshafts. They do not make manhole covers.
Terry Burtz
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