Has this engine been blueprinted? Because if it hasn’t, there’s no way I’d go below .030” for quench. This is a street engine right?
There’s a lot of crap on the internet, and guys love to one up each other. Not to mention you don’t usually get the whole story. Like, ok, maybe some fully blueprinted, track only engine assembled by a known drag race engine builder ran a .021” quench. It could have happened. Did it last 100k miles? Or one season? And maybe the guy that built it knows a whole bunch of tricks to pull that off and make it live.
I see the same thing with tire combinations all the time. Guys will say they run some gigantic tire and didn’t do any trimming and it never rubs. But then you look at the information they’re not giving you, their car is raised up like a 4x4, they only drive it a few hundred miles a year, they trailer it, etc, etc. They’re not driving around town and over speed bumps or taking steep parking lot transitions etc, and maybe don’t notice that they actually ARE rubbing when they do encounter real world situations. But that’s not the story you’ll hear on the ‘net, and a lot of guys will get defensive when you start asking them questions if it suddenly seems like they’re not 100% right.
So, I would be real careful about some of the crazy quench numbers you hear.
Remember what your original goal was, a street engine with good torque and low end. You don’t need 10:1 compression and a tiny quench to achieve that. Shaving the pistons isn’t a bad idea, but, remember that you’ve got hypers and not forged pistons. You might wanna ask a tech at KB what you options/limits are for doing some milling there.
