It's a Blueprint BP3474CT longblock.
About $3,400 from Summit, because they kicked back a ton of Summit Bucks.
It ships by truck freight. They pick the destination terminal and shipper.
I expected to pay on my own for lift gate delivery service from the shipping terminal to my home.
However, they didn't charge me for that. Not sure why. It may have been because Summit picked a terminal about 75 miles from me.
The crating was solid, even though it looked a little flaky, that was just the rickety pallet the crate was strapped to.
Getting it out of the crate and on the engine stand was fiddly, and it took me an afternoon, but it wasn't hard.
Blueprint bolts on an intake and carb at the factory, fills it up with oil, and puts it on an engine dyno.
Here are a few photos of the motor right out of the box
They used decent FelPro gaskets at the factory.
My E36 track car project started life with a stock 302. I bought it in a refreshed Foxbody Mustang, and sold the chassis to a guy up in Michigan, where they can't find rust-free chassis any more.
The Mustang guy had refreshed the engines with new bearings, valve seals and springs, and a Track Heat crank. He didn't do the piston rings or machine the block, because it had great leakdown tests.
I got the E36 pretty well sorted using that motor.
The thing is, the rings don't seal well at higher RPMs. The compression numbers are all still +/- 10% of 160 psi, and it runs normally on the street.
But start running it at 4K on up, and the crankcase pressure climbs way up, and the oil hits 250 degrees, even with an oil cooler.
I started looking for a shortblock. I have a used set of Twisted Wedge heads. But by the time I added in rocker arms, rods, lifters, machine shop cleanup, guide and seals . . . the all-in price was climbing really fast, very close to what I paid for this longblock.
More photos of it out of the box
JBasham said:the all-in price was climbing really fast, very close to what I paid for this longblock.
This apparently happens. Between setbacks, surprises, used parts turning out to not be what they were presented as and paying the machinist. A close friend's pieced together 383 Chevy is guaranteed to end up costing him several hundred more than the blueprint long block would have been. And that wouldn't have involved the car being down for over 6 months.
One of the more tedious things about the swap was the exhaust. It works great, but it took a lot of conceptual development time.
We used two Mac shorty headers, both from the passenger side, so the one on the driver's side dumped front.
Being a straight-6 chassis, it didn't have much room to try going back down the driver's side with the driver's side header. That's where the stock fuel lines go, and the ground clearance would have been less than we wanted for an HPDE car.
We had to move the ABS pump up from the driver's side firewall to the front of the subframe horn to get it away from the header. Most guys leave it back at the firewall, but I wasn't crazy about that for an HPDE car.
With both 2.5" exhaust feeds exiting the engine bay on the passenger side, everything fit in the available exhaust channel nice and tight.
For the first draft of the car, I just used the stock cats/midpipe/exhaust, connected to the dual 2.5" pipes. It was getting to be the end of winter and I wanted to get it out of the garage and on track.
Then the next winter, I went back and re-did the rest of the exhaust. I put a Borla x-pipe dual in, dual out muffler where the cats used to be, and ran 2.5" pipe all the way to the rear bumper with turn-downs. It sounds really fun.
The beginning of this video has an exhaust sound clip.
Wow, look at the torque! What's the cam specs?
Daylan C said:JBasham said:the all-in price was climbing really fast, very close to what I paid for this longblock.
This apparently happens. Between setbacks, surprises, used parts turning out to not be what they were presented as and paying the machinist. A close friend's pieced together 383 Chevy is guaranteed to end up costing him several hundred more than the blueprint long block would have been. And that wouldn't have involved the car being down for over 6 months.
Based on your sig, I'm with you on the Easy Button thing!
I don't know how the Blueprint Chevy lineup works. On the Ford longblocks and crate motors, they use in-house aluminum heads. In the Ford community, there is nothing but hate for anything but the name-brand heads.
I figured it was pretty much a free option to give them a try. If I decide they aren't good, I can pay up for getting the Twisted Wedge heads refreshed and install those.
Assuming the valves will clear using the cam Blueprint installed in the longblock, I will even have back-to-back dynos to see what changed.
Floating Doc said:Wow, look at the torque! What's the cam specs?
.543/.554
112 degrees at 0.050 inches of lift
duration 218 intake, 226 exhaust
The exhaust valves on SBF motors are smaller than the intakes, so they use a differential cam spec.
The 302 is a torquey motor to start with, but stroking it to 347 takes that up a level. BUT the trade-off is rod angles are worse on the 347, so the motor might not live as long.
The lower intake (TrickFlow Track Heat, used) went on easily. I used Gasgacinch, which I like. Keeps things positioned right, and makes removal later a Cinch.
I used the FelPro SBF gaskets SFL1250S3 with the metal laminated in the middle. I'm worried about heat, since it's for HPDE.
The Blueprint heads have ports that are just a touch shy of the dimensions everyone else seems to be using. Why? Why?
Trimming the FelPros wasn't impossible, but it involved a die grinder and it took some finesse.
Blueprint ships their engines with a timing cover for a stock-rotation water pump.
I have a reverse-rotation setup (lets us use a serpentine belt). So, the timing cover needs to be changed.
The fine men and women of Blueprint Engines know how to mount a gasket. That cover did. not. want. to. come. off.
The timing roller chain set looks good, and it's installed right.
Scraping off the FelPro gasket was tedious.
I don't have oil pressure problems on track with the original motor, using a stock pan. But there are a couple places with big decel feeding over into 1.3g cornering, and I see a momentary dip.
I'm worried the extra power might just make that worse. I thought I could get an aftermarket baffled pan. But things are so tight, nothing fits. So, I need to baffle the pan and fit a windage tray.
Taking the Blueprint pan off was right up there with the timing cover. They knows their gaskets.
Balancing work
Shiny new cylinder walls, pistons, and rods.
Cleaned off the gasket silicone and removed the oil pump pickup. Windage tray bolts installed.
Melling high volume oil pump
Canton Racing Windage Tray 20-930 and Milodon 81157 tray bolts
Using the Milodon bolts, clears the 347 rotating assembly, even though it's a 302 windage tray. The bolts arrived in a shrink plastic/hang tag display package that coated them with gummy residue. Icky. But they have a ton of adjustment range, so it's worth it.
This shows the tray sitting on the bolt shoulders. Ultimately I wound up drilling out the tray holes a little larger so it would drop down over the shoulders and get a little closer to the rotating assembly. I put a few SAE washers on top of the crank cap bolts to set the height. I also had to shorten the tips of the front two bolts with a band saw, because they hit the oil pan.
Here you can see, I'm too high, and the oil pump pickup won't clear. So I needed to make a slot for the pickup.
The slot I cut located right on one side of the pickup, but not the other. Also, the mesh was going to flop around if I didn't tack down around the cut spots. So I welded some sheet metal tabs on the rotating side to fill the gaps and give me a place to tack the mesh.
Ugly, but durable. No MIG gas in the house but CO2 at the time.
All bolted down. High-temp Loctite Red on the nuts.
Doing the oil pan baffle was fiddly. Mocking up the cardboard took a lot of T&E. Then I had a serious mental lapse and cut it out of 20 gauge steel. That was way too thin to weld cleanly to the pan, especially since I still had nothing on hand but CO2 for MIG gas.
We filled the oil pan with used engine oil, and tilted it all over the place to make sure we had enough flow-back to keep the pickup covered.
It looked good, so I re-installed the pan with a FelPro SFLOS34508R and oil-proof high temp RTV.
So, before I go any further, here's a quiz:
What key step did I skip?
I wonder if this would work with AWD?
svxsti said:I wonder if this would work with AWD?
Almost anything is possible with enough time and money. Not sure how it really pertains to what OP was documenting though....
JBasham, just curious what sent you down the SBF route for your E36 in the first place?
JBasham said:We filled the oil pan with used engine oil, and tilted it all over the place to make sure we had enough flow-back to keep the pickup covered.
It looked good, so I re-installed the pan with a FelPro SFLOS34508R and oil-proof high temp RTV.
So, before I go any further, here's a quiz:
What key step did I skip?
I believe you're referring to checking the pick up clearance.
Had that same issue with that canton windage tray. Ended up trimming a bit less and hammering a indent to clear the pickup. Im only building a 331 so I may not have had to pull the screen up nearly as high. Only 2 washers in the rear and 1 washer on the front.
What are the specs on the heads that crate motor came with?
Floating Doc said:JBasham said:We filled the oil pan with used engine oil, and tilted it all over the place to make sure we had enough flow-back to keep the pickup covered.
It looked good, so I re-installed the pan with a FelPro SFLOS34508R and oil-proof high temp RTV.
So, before I go any further, here's a quiz:
What key step did I skip?
I believe you're referring to checking the pick up clearance.
Good guess, but in my case, I forgot to figure out how the dipstick was going to make it to the oil in the pan through all that windage tray and baffle.
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