[blykins]

You may have a point about R&D, but I can assure you that once the R&D is done, the guys slapping these things together don't take hours and hours to mock-up, check clearances, spend more hours fine tuning, then hours assembling. They produce as many as they can, as fast as they can. They spend the dough to figure out what parts work well together and that's where it stops. I'll spend half a day to a day doing mock-ups....figuring out where I want the cam timing, degreeing the cam, checking main/rod clearances, checking piston/bore clearances, putting the pistons on the rods then checking rod/rod clearances, checking piston/valve clearances, etc, etc.

I can guarantee you that these guys get a batch of crankshafts in and just throw a set of standard bearings in there and roll with it. Blocks are not honed to fit pistons. Cams are not degreed. They don't care that sometimes the Scat rods and crank come in at two opposite ends of the tolerance scale and if you use a standard rod bearing, you get .003" rod bearing clearance....or that some of the pistons vary by .0005" on diameter and instead of running a .004" minimum clearance, they're now at maybe .0035" or so. Do they actually take time to file and gap all the rings? I'd bet that the rings are pre-fit and that they don't even double check them.

Not every engine is ran in for 50 hours in a test cell is what I'm getting at. Maybe one of them is, but from then on, it's wham-bam, thank-ya-mam.

You may say that I'm too picky and I'm splitting hairs, but I prefer to be that way....that's what they call a custom engine.

As far as the small shop engine builders, I doubt any of them (myself included) don't have access to a dyno. We all know what combos work and work well and once that combination of parts is found, it's not hard to duplicate it.