Alright, I'm considering buying a 454 to stroke it out but I'm getting all kinds of wrong information everywhere. I've called two shops about machinework for it. Naturally, I would imagine the workload is the same unless they hike the price. I've gotten quotes for $800 and $720 to get the block completely ready for assembly. This doesn't include any clearancing they would've needed to do for a stroker kit. That just sounds outrageous to me, but I'm new to BBC's so I honestly don't know. Might just be another part of "you gotta pay to play" but I definitely don't want to get suckered into overpriced machinework either. What have you guys paid to get yours done?

 

Define this term.

To different people in different situations, this might mean something VASTLY different.

Your price quotes look fairly ballparkish for just yerbasic street performance prep work, including nothing of what I would call "blueprinting". What you WON'T get would be things like decking to an EXACT deck height, squaring the bell housing flange, index boring the cyls so that they are spaced EXACTLY as they should be and are EXACTLY perpendicular to the crank CL and EXACTLY centered on the rod journals, align-boring, and so on. Other examples of operations for tightening up sloppy factory production tolerances will no doubt occur to anyone that's ever done anything beyond shadetree backyard type builds.

I wouldn't expect machine work prices to vary very much from one type of block to another (SB to BB, or Chevy to Ford for example) with the same # of cyls.

At that low of a price, don't expect much attention to detail. You should just get cleanup, a basic bore & hone, and the standard checks for cracks and such. Maybe some light "cleanup" decking not involving precision but rather just surface prep.

 

Yeah that was what I was implying. I didn't ask for blueprinting because I don't need it for what I'm doing. I just asked them for the basic bore/hone,magnaflux, hot tanking, you know. I asked an old timer I know and he said he had all of this done for $360 on a smallblock, so that's why I am confused here. He said there shouldn't be any difference in price, yet that's not what I'm seeing. I told the machine shop I wasn't building a race block and if I was going that route I wouldnt waste my time on a stock block and I'd just buy a Dart block instead.