How do you cut up an engine block?

I have an older flatbed Dodge truck that I was going to make into a "barn find" auto parts store delivery truck, complete with empty Nehi bottles on the passenger's floor, a 50's girlie magazine, and a few neat old engine parts and junk on the bed. One of the things that I want to use is an old flathead engine that I got from a friend of mine after he discovered a few HUGE cracks in it (apparently from the vehicle being stored with plain water in the block in the winter).

Those things are a CHUNK of metal and are heavy as hell, so what I thought of doing is to gut & lighten up the block and then screw the heads back on to make it look like a complete engine. I thought that if I cut the areas between the cylinders and the lifter valley out that it would help with the weight problem considerably, but... hitting it with a Sawzall and an 18tpi blade took five minutes or so to put only a half inch deep cut in between two cylinders. A friend suggested using a cutting wheel, but my experience with thin sheet metal and cutting wheels on a 4" Makita grinder makes me think that I'd go through a LOT of cutting wheels.

I had also thought of cutting up some old 318 smog heads that I have laying around and making some of those cool "cutaway" engine parts that the technical schools used to have laying around too, so this information WILL be put to good use.

Like everybody, I'm on a pretty tight budget, so things like acid dipping, buying a plasma cutter, etc... are out of reach at the moment.

Any other ideas? Would an acetylene torch work well enough on cast iron? How about a different pitch of blade in the Sawzall?

 

My Dad and his brother hacksawed a Model T engine in half in the early forties, when they were kids, to make a two cylinder go-kart engine (they didn't call 'em go-karts). The go-kart ran but it was probably like Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose - A one-time deal. The only thing the old man would say about it was "If I had to do that again, I'd do it differently".

 

A metal shop with a big production band saw should be able to do the job.

 

or take it to a machine shop and have them end mill it out?..$

how important is it for you to do this...? really?

 

water jet

 

torch might do it.

 

use a very hot torch, with a small nozzle and get a good welders glove on and reach torch in the cylinders and cut away, make sure you have a splash hood/protection on, cast don't like the torch

 

There are a lot of silicone casting products available now...why not make a mold of the block and cast it in resin. If you did a decent job of it then you may be able to sell more of the blocks to others to use as mockups. Take a look at some of the videos on the Smooth-On website, these guys make molds of just about everything.

 

I'd leave the block alone, it's a bitch to try to cut it up.

 

Mac VanPelt here on the HAMB sells the plastic blocks that look like the real thing and weigh NADA in comparison....might be a better option.

 

I'd do the mold and resin rodeo too. Theres a market for mock-up engines. I know they have all the standard sbc,sbf stuff. Look in Summit and JEGs. They have em.
That'll be cool. I lived in a house that was a print shop and have alot of calendars and stuff I retrieved from the dumpster when they cleaned it out. It was heart breaking.

 

Man, some of you guys have a lot of time and energy to spend on some strange projects.....

 

If it's just for display, leave it as it is. You won't gain much by gutting it.

 

can't cut cast with a torch. a carbon arc would make short but messy work of it.

 

Air arc.

 

We had a cutaway training aid made out of a 36 Dodge chassis at Toppenish, High School in the autoshop where I was a student and then teacher. It was made in the 50's by students who cut it all apart with hacksaws.

It must have taken them quite a while and a lot of blades as everything was cut to see how it would work including engine, trans, rear end, brake drums and wheel cylinders.
It ran off an electric motor and belt system and one could shift through the gears in the trans or could watch the valves open and close and pistons go up and down to show the four strokes and four cycles of the engine.

 

I've used a tool called a mag-rod torch (at least that's what we called it ). Basically it was a 3/8"-1/2" magnesium (or magnesium alloy) pipe threaded to an air valve. You would make a small fire with wood and diesel, heat the end of the pipe, then apply air. Once the torch was burning you could slice (and I do mean SLICE!) through anything. We used it to cut up aluminum that had pooled out of the reduction cells in the smelter I worked in. I imagine it would annihilate iron after what I've seen it do to aluminum and steel.

I've also used carbon rod on a big DC welder to cut aluminum, much slower but not nearly as volatile. It takes a pretty good sized welder to get the job done though...it's been years since I've done that, I don't remember what the rod was exactly, I want to say high nickel (?)... it may not even be applicable to iron, so I'm just throwing that one out there.

 

Finish the truck, THEN worry about all the accessories!

 

Thanks for the responses so far! I really DON'T have a lot of free time, but I have even less money, so while I appreciate the feedback some of these ideas sound expensive. (Forgive me if they're not.)

Ordinarily I wouldn't do something this ambitious, but that darn engine is HEEEAAAAVVVYYY. I mess around a lot with big block Mopar stuff and I don't think that a 440 block and heads are as heavy as that flathead is!!! My truck only has a 6 cyl in it, so any weight reduction should help with driveability and acceleration, and that's really the ONLY reason that I'm doing it.
As far as slicing the smogger 318 heads... I've always thought that they looked cool sitting on a desk with the intake and exhaust runners and the coolant jackets all painted up.... But mine have been sitting on the shelf for about 7 or 8 years waiting for me to run out of other more important projects. So as far as "free time"... yeah. Sometimes I do have just a few minutes to kill and figured that if I could lighten that thing up a little at a time...???

I do like the resin casting idea and selling plastic mock-up blocks! I've seen them in Summit and Jegs and thought that they'd be cool for building a nice "display" engine for a decked out garage, because if I had a REAL 426 Hemi it sure as hell wouldn't be a display engine!

MR48CHEV - I saw something like that at the Mopar Nationals once. They had a cutaway 426 Hemi that was done by Chrysler to show how the pistons, valvetrain, etc. worked and a lot of the interior parts were either chromed or painted. That thing was way cool! There also used to be a restaurant/bar in Pittsburgh near Monroeville called "Plug & Piston" that had all kinds of car stuff and cutaway stuff like that, and they had a cutaway Chrysler Torqueflite in a big plastic display case near the front door. They even sliced part of the valve body, the torque converter... and it was amazing (to ME anyway!) how all of that stuff fits and works together. I'm a Mechanical Designer for a defense contractor and am just fascinated by stuff like that and to see how it all works once it is assembled. I get to walk around on US Navy ships a lot for my work, and I try to absorb how it all works and fits together there too. I try to keep in mind how difficult that it must have been for the engineers and draftsmen to get all of that on paper so that the tooling guys could actually make the parts and make them all fit together and work properly.

 

?? Isn't this site about building drivers?

 

Yessss... that's why I want to lighten up the boat anchor. So that I can drive the hell out of it and make it a little more fun. Heavy = Slow It's only a 6 cylinder up front.

The 49 is going to get driven in the rain & sun on a regular basis, don't you worry! Anyone that knows me knows that I drive the hell out of my nice stuff as often as I can, and even my daily driver is an (OT, yes) 74 Dodge Monaco (Bluesmobile replica) with 255,000 miles on it and it has never been on a trailer to go to any shows or parades, including 4-hour-each-way trips to Roanoke for Star City Motor Madness. The 49's patina is going to stay as-is for that very reason, so that I can leave the house if it is raining or sunny and not care at all.

 

The Nats are great aren't they.
Brice road is a lot of fun.

Tommy

 

A buddy of mine just sent me this...

http://www.vanpeltsales.com/FH_web/replica-ford-flathd-prices.htm

Here's a link for everything that they sell:
http://www.vanpeltsales.com/FH_web/replica-engines.htm

I can't afford this at the moment, but if you were looking to build a car and needed a mock-up motor, or a cool display engine for the man cave...

Thanks for the tips on cutting up the block that I have though! The torch might be the easiest and cheapest way to lighten that thing up. (Any of you lifted a bare Flathead block lately???)

 

I had a similar idea about gutting a broken sbc, figuring it would be cheaper than buying a plastic mock-up block. I used a torch and it wasnt pretty. You can cut cast iron with a hot torch, but it spits back at you something fierce. I made all of the cuts that I thought I needed in the deck surface, lifter valley and the bottoms of the cylinders and it still wouldnt come apart. Theres a lot more in there than initially meets the eye. I got to the thick main bearing webs and finally threw in the towel. I spent the cash and bought a plastic block!

 

Getting back to the resin casting, people would probably buy them for coffee tables, they have a nice long flat top.
But thats just my warped opinion.
Cheers. Waz.

 

By the looks at the answers here it doesn't look as easy as getting to the center of a tootsie roll pop...

 

When I wanted to slice apart a cylinder head to figure out how much to port, I used a cut-off wheel mounted on a chain saw motor. The kind contractors use them to cut ductile iron pipe with. Fire departments use them for cutting through a roof. Will slice and dice with ease for a cut away but would be hard if you want to take just the guts out of a block.

 

Bfh

 

I've had this one cookin in my head for a long time....Glad I'm not the only warped one out there.