Main cap girdles re-discussed
So a question if yall can stop feudin long enough. Those of you who seem to oppose stud girdles, are yall saying that even a big block stud girdle that tied the mains and the oil pan rails together adds zero strength?
I‘m saying yes. It not only does nothing, it actually screws **** up.
If you can find a Hemi block you can lay it next to a standard wedge block and see the differences.
The stud girdle, the cross bolt caps and all that junk won’t do anything but lighten your wallet on a standard block.
Any time you take the load from one main bearing and try to spread that load to other bearings you set up a giant tuning fork. And as Randy Neal from CWT says “once you excite one part of the system you can’t stop it”.
There are three things (well four but I forgot one as I typed that) you can do to help these blocks survive. The problem is no one likes to hear the truth of it.
1. Aluminum main caps.
2. Main studs.
3. Aluminum rods.
4. A crank damper that doesn’t have rubber in it.
Thats it. Anything else is just eating money for no benefit.
And yes, I’ve done engines with stud girdles because the customer thinks he is smarter than everyone building engines. And bet your *** when it comes back in the main bearings will be showing distress in every kind of way you never see with anything else.
Of course the customer doesn’t see it or know it because they deal with one engine and they don’t know what they are looking at.
Ive also installed them on some stuff that didn’t need anything but the girdle sounds cool when you are leaning on the fence at the drag strip telling your buddies all about your cool **** while your junk is at home because it’s so slow a Prius would give it a hard run for the money.
Or when you come to places like this.
Just think about it Rob. Think about the load on the front main cap. Then think what happens when you spread that load to another cap that isn’t getting oil in the journal to form the wedge that keeps the crank off the bearing.
