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The Dart main caps are machined from billet steel. You can see what old Hot Rodders mean by 4 bolt mains in the extreme here. The stock Small Block uses wimpy cast iron caps held in by only two bolts. The massive Dart pieces use 4 big ARP studs per caps and the cap bridges the crankcase from rail to rail which greatly improves stiffness. You can really see the differential in counterweight thickness mentioned previously in this picture.
The crank spins in Mahle Clevite CL77 tri armor super buff bearings. This is a moly/graphite/teflon based coating over a copper, tin and lead tri metal bearing. A tri metal bearing has the best combination of load bearing toughness and embedabiilty forgivness. Form this angle you can see how the interior of the block was sanded smooth and deburred to remove embedded casting sand and help speed oil return and reduce windage losses.
Brian Crower supplied the Maxi Light connecting rods. Maxi Light rods are made from vacuum degassed (melted in a vacuum to eliminate internal bubbling and other flaws) 4340 steel forgings for maximum toughness and strength. The rods are forged, finish machined, polished and shotpeened to maximize fatigue life. Our rods are fairly long at 6″ to keep a decent rod ratio and reduce piston speed in our stoker motor. BC does have domestic engine parts, a lot of good ones, you just have to ask.
The Brian Crower rods have super strong H11 steel bolts rated to 200,000 psi plus. Since the rod bolts are the rod’s weakest link you can’t skimp here.
The rod’s small end is set up to be fully floating with a bronze bushing. There is no oiling hole to weaken the rod’s small end as the JE pistons we are using have dual pin oilers so hopefully we will get a lot of lubricant to this area.
JE Provided custom forged pistons. Since our cylinder heads have a really small combustion chamber volume of 59cc, we will need a pretty deep dish to reach our desired compression ratio of 10:1. In naturally aspirated form our engine ran at 13.5:1 so we are really dropping the compression. Since our fuel is VP110 we can run a fairly high compression of 10:1 with some boost on top. This compression ratio should allow our engine to produce decent power even when not in boost.
