I'll try not to plug myself too much /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif But rather inform people on what I do at my shop. I build a race cars for customers every once in awhile, but mostly we do is complete engines and engine components. I started off pretty much catering to SCCA Spridget racing crowd, because that was what I was involved in, but as time has grown, I moved into MGB and Spitfire race/performance engines as well. The street market, especially the street MGB crowd started becoming a bigger part of my business. Now I'm getting even more stockish engine work, just this week I made an agreement to do what the customer referred to as a stock 1275 for his Bugeye. If we have to replace a cam in his core engine, we may go with something just a little bit more and also with our replacement piston choice we'll get a slight bump in horsepower without breaking the bank, he should get a fair amount of improvement for a fraction of the cost of a big buck high performance engine. I've built 100% toatlly stock, I did a 948 a couple years back for a guy. Then we also for some race and street customer just do certain engine components, like build the cylinder head, modify rods or cranks, or do balance work, really whatever the customer wants.
Some people just want me to take care of everything in a complete engine build and if so I do that, but alot of LBCs owners want more control in the project, so I now offer a new engine program where for small fee I provide the customer with a itemized list of parts numbers, prices and where to buy, custom tailored to the engine they want, then they control the parts budget and I just do the labor, parts are not where I make my money anyway. my shop is more more labor oriented, I just dabble in parts. We also geting into providing customer with refurbished stock parts like the spin on oil filter housing and manifold you got from me, hopefully you will like those this week coming, you should get those by Wensday since it's the week of the fourth. In cases like the parts you bought, the whole idea is to get parts to you that are already cleaned and refurbished, so they lessen the prep time for the customer, rahter than buying some pig-in a poke crap off Ebay that might end up being junk when you get it.
Just for kicks because I know you guys would like to hear this, this is what currently whats on the slab at my shop.
(1) Finishing up installatioin in the car of a high performance MGB engine with a aluminum cross flow had and more goodies than you can shake a stick at.
(2) A complete MG Midget 1275 vintage race Engine, Carrillo rods, Comptune/tabor cylinder head the customer already had big valves, trick oversized valve springs, JE pistons, Titan roller rocker, tubular pushrods, Comptune race cam Winners Circle oil pat etc, etc.. This wil be a pretty trick motor with slightly lower compression than a full out sprint race motor, the customer want to make a run at HSR enduro series and that is what target goal is for this motor.
(3 & 4) Two MGB street motors, pretty much the same recipe, port and polish cylinder heads, solid bottom ends with a few upgrades for performance and reliabilty.
(5) Bottom end components for SCCA 948 HP race motor, Prepping the JE domed pistons, carrillo rods and billet crank for the customer to assemble his self, Did all the clearence work on paper so the customer could feed it to his local machine shop.
(6) pretty much the same deal as #5 with a SCCA FP 1275 race motor, just making repairs for this guy, sizing rods, checking the block over, prepping him another crankshaft etc.
(7 and 8) rebuild a repair a vintage BHP spitfore 1296 race engine and build a SCCA race 1098 race engine where the customer has been collecting some really nice components, but the time dead line for these two engine is much more relaxed due to the customers working on/building thier race cars and not being ready for the motors currently.
They are more small jobs like some SU carb rebuilding, stock flywheel lightening etc.
That's just a run down of what going on in the shop. I'll tell this much, I have to try very hard to find something to complain about after a day of work. I'm very lucky to be able to do for a living what I love to do.