I grew up around a race shop in the early 1950's, watching my father build alcohol-fueled flathead Ford V8's for the dirt tracks around middle Tennessee. What's called "blueprinting" these days was just routine practice building those engines. Engine prep started out with line-boring the block to establish a baseline for all the other operations. Then the top of the block is shaved a little (using the main bearing bores as a reference) to assure that the crank and the top of the block are parallel. Bore the cylinders, using the top of the block as a reference, so everything is square and straight. Hone the cylinders with a stress plate bolted on to assure the cylinders are round when the heads are torqued down. Measure the center to center length of all the connecting rods to find the shortest one, then recondition all the other rods to the same length. Every moving part gets weight-matched to 1/10 gram. (A dollar bill weighs one gram). Spin-balance the crankshaft.
Buy a BUNCH of rod and main bearings and measure the wall thickness of each one to match them up, then check for correct oil clearance on every bearing when they're assembled in the block and rods. Race engine clearances will be approximately double those needed for a street engine. We're building for max power, not longevity. A race engine with mufflers sounds like there are a bunch of little guys with sledgehammers inside, trying to get out! Test-assemble the engine and measure piston deck height. Tear it down and deck the block a second time to get minimum deck clearance. Once the block and rotating assembly is correctly matched, do the same sort of procedure on the heads, degree the cam, decide how much advance or retard the cam needs, assemble and dyno-test the engine and adjust valve and ignition timing for max torque and/or horsepower.
Run the engine less than 1,000 miles on the race track, and if it survives, do it all over again! Doing this sort of stuff to a street engine is stupid!
Jerry
