The Ford Barn

Bruce Lancaster · 04-20-2015, 01:33 PM

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That is downright inspiring! Kind of like the article in Rod in Custom magazine about 1954, in which a guy sawed up two T blocks and about four each cranks and cams and built a 6-cylinder T engine in his back yard! That guy actually built a fire brick oven around the blocks as he welded them, preheating, removing a few bricks to do the welds, restacking, keeping the thing hot...
On saving old flatheads: Look around. More new crank assemblies, more suppliers of internals and externals, repros or re-issues of more and more speed equipment, are popping up all over. We are in a golden age...EXCEPT for blocks. There are initiatives, but so far no one has come out with a mail order new block for us, and the one that seems (and has seemed for a decade or more) to be closest to actually arriving also promises to be insanely expensive.
We are now re-finding blocks that someone else discarded or passed over for good reasons years ago, and dragging lumps out of ditches and fields, naturally meaning that a high percentage are cracked. Blocks are the shortage now. Fixing a few cracks is likely to start sounding cheap real soon...

04-20-2015, 01:33 PM	#6
Bruce Lancaster Member Emeritus Join Date: May 2010 Location: Madison, NJ Posts: 5,230	Re: Don't throw anything away Sponsored Links (Register now to hide all advertisements) That is downright inspiring! Kind of like the article in Rod in Custom magazine about 1954, in which a guy sawed up two T blocks and about four each cranks and cams and built a 6-cylinder T engine in his back yard! That guy actually built a fire brick oven around the blocks as he welded them, preheating, removing a few bricks to do the welds, restacking, keeping the thing hot... On saving old flatheads: Look around. More new crank assemblies, more suppliers of internals and externals, repros or re-issues of more and more speed equipment, are popping up all over. We are in a golden age...EXCEPT for blocks. There are initiatives, but so far no one has come out with a mail order new block for us, and the one that seems (and has seemed for a decade or more) to be closest to actually arriving also promises to be insanely expensive. We are now re-finding blocks that someone else discarded or passed over for good reasons years ago, and dragging lumps out of ditches and fields, naturally meaning that a high percentage are cracked. Blocks are the shortage now. Fixing a few cracks is likely to start sounding cheap real soon...