AutoZone and Discount auto use a supplier named ReCon.....Advance price was $1300 for an engine classified as a 1960 Biscayne replacement. The same engine from AutoZone was $2300. delivered to their store in less than a week. Advanced/Discounts core charge was low and I intended to keep my old engine to rebuild personally at my leisure. AutoZones was double that of Discounts. Something didn't make sense!
The AutoZone manager (a personal friend) called ReCon....got shuffled around to several departments until we got the actual rebuild shop. The bottom line was that they had no 235 cores. You ship them yours, they rebuild it and ship it back. That's assuming your core is good. Our question about what would happen if a block or head could not be rebuilt went unanswered. Turn-around time was 4-6 weeks....maybe.
Time to bite the bullet! There is no cheap, fast way to get a quality rebuilt. Cheap, fast, quality....pick 2 out of the 3!!!
I wound up buying a 2nd good engine, so I could keep my truck on the road, found a quality machine shop with a knowedgeable guy that knew about converting to full flow filtering, drilling the crank for removing and installing the harmonic balancer and setting up some accessory bosses on the passengers side. Also going to do a dynamic balance on the rotating assembly. Up front his time estimate was 4-6 weeks. So far he's on schedule, he keeps me posted on progress and his shop is a marvel of efficiency.
The point I'm trying to make, is that our old engines are not sitting on rebuilders racks waiting for delivery in a week. If you find one, that's reasonably priced, you still don't have any real guarantee of it's quality. Before you take some suppliers word as gospel, you'd better do some research and make sure they can deliver what they offer. I guess it's just a sign of the times!!!
