Trinkets: The expensive part

Buying the big ticket items for cars is rarely the expensive part. A new motor for example, you might spend a few grand on that in one chunk, but the peripheral stuff really adds up.

The motor in the Red Lady right now is a 4-bolt 350 with a 307 crank in it. It has excellent World Sportsman heads on it, an ridiculously big cam, and Victor Jnr intake, but unfortunately it also has a cast crank and factory rods. It's built stupidly. The top end is built to make horsepower that the bottom end can't support. For such a small-ish displacement (331 ci) the heads and cam will make power up around 7200 rpm, but the more or less stock bottom end will have flown to peices long before it ever sees that sort of engine speed. So it's not how I would build an engine. I really only bought it because it was cheap. I paid $2600 for it, and it was more or less complete, or so I thought.

It's not that I got ripped off, on the contrary, the heads alone on the motor are worth $2500, and a 4-bolt 010 block is probably worth $1000 on it's own too, not to mention all the machine work that's been done on it. It's just that there are so many little bits and pieces that are required to make it REALLY complete. The engine I bought was basically a long engine, plus intake. That means I had to add a carb, distributor, alternator, water pump, oil filter adapter and filter, fuel pump, brackets and pulleys, valve covers, torque converter, flexplate, water outlet.... the list just goes on for miles. So today I bought a few little things for the motor that aren't really expected in a "long motor" but that are necessary to have a running motor. The total was $121, and the parts were as follows:

• Oil Filter
• Oil Filter adapter and the unique bolts that hold it on
• PCV Valve
• Timing Tab
• Exhaust flange gaskets (between exh. manifold and pipe)
• Fuel pump fittings

This lot of purchases got me thinking, and I decided to do a quick comparison of the cost of the "engine" vs. the cost of the peripheral stuff subsequent to the motor purchase (not counting things that pertain to the previous engine, of course) and it confirmed my suspicion: $2600 for the engine and $2837.27 since the purchase of the engine on related parts. It really adds up!