Of the Automotive type of course.. Since I've been talking about building my first Flat Head Ford engine, I snapped a few pictures yesterday.

Here's the block ready for assembly as soon as I finish rounding up info and some toolage to put the valve/guide/spring assemblies back in.







It's just gonna be weird bolting the exhaust manifolds to the side of the block instead of the usual heads.....











Cleaned up pretty nice, huh. The cylinders have been bored and honed. The valve seats have been machined.

Here's a race motor we frequently refresh for a customer who runs it in his alcohol dragster. It's a 500CI big block. Performance everything. Brodix heads... The works.







They guy was pulling the truck in to pick it up as I snapped these pictures. Hopefully I can get to assembling the Flat Head this week and get some finished pics. I'm not sure what color the fellow is going to have the engine painted but I think it's going to be a custom paint job so my pics will be a NMF of sorts.. Oh, and in that last couple of pictures you can see the nice hole in the wall next to the light switches where I tried to remodel the front entrance with the forklift a couple of years ago... Oops.. I guess I need to fix that someday.

Cheers,
Dave

Not as purty as, say Nicole Kidman, but there's just something about a finely made hunk of machinery.
I've been looking for some nice toolage myself for years....

Dave, I'm not sure about the guides, my foggy memory is they were just bored/broached in to the block. A good machine shop could probably bore for phosphor/bronze or silicon/bronze guides no problem. A gentleman from back home in Newport News used two pieces of steel with a cabinet hinge on one end, and a slot in the other end of both pieces. He would place the valve in the block compress the spring with the two pieces of steel and a bolt and nut, when he got the spring compressed enough, he loaded the valve keepers with grease and plasced them on the valve tip and unscrewed the spring compressor to release the spring and retainer. Hoipe this helps, Joel.

That block is so clean you could eat off'n it. Nice crosshatching in the cylinders too!

Does the shop have a tank, machining and media blast service??? Wonderful playground! I use to work for a company that had an engine shop.

quite a few toys but we don't have a media blaster cabinet yet. We send stuff that needs blasted to another shop down the road. Right now we have two lathes, boring machine, honing machine, a hot pressure washing cabinet, valve grinding machine, and a flywheel grinder (that also works great for resurfacing brake rotors as it puts a factory cross hatch pattern on them as well as straighten them out) plus the 40+ year collection of tools and gadgets (some custom made tools too) to do the job. I'm trying to talk Dad into expanding the shop out back to move all the tear down and cleaning equipment into it's own area. The shop as it is now, is kind of crowded. I'm hoping that while I'm taking my classes to get back into the IT Network Engineering/Administration field, I can help Dad build up the shop to where it can generate the income potential it's always had.

Here's a pic of the shop from the front. I'm still in the process of cleaning out all the junk Dad has collected (insert Sanford and Sons theme song music here) from the right side of the place. Now for the left... The blue Buick is my Mom's car that I've got to fix and isn't really junk. Oh, that pic reminds me, I've got to repaint the phone number. It's changed...



Cheers,
Dave