Are people really charging £200 for turned arms?

I think the last standard arm I bought was £50. X2 and plus some skilled cutting and sticking...

Will most definitely become cheaper, it is now essential (for the modified class) to spend big money on engine development otherwise you'll get nowhere, all of our winning engines up to 2001 were made with a mix of bits from various stock secondhand parts, built in our own time with just common sense and time served 2cv knowledge, in pure parts or payment to others they cost virtually nothing and we never had one engine failure from 1989 to 2001. The same engines could equally be used for a world raid afterwards.

For Snetterton 24hr , there's a very good chance of a win by a budget car...

It seems to me ( in my experiences of picking up the pieces) that the major expense is now all the workarounds to get the engines to not self destruct on that cam.

Budget class taking that cam out the equation takes the "Russian Roulette" element and means that a stack of spare engines is now not an essential part of the race. Some cams run out of lobe after a few hours of use - others like mine seem to go on for ever(4 24hrs and pulled the Hollismobile round Spa-that cam came out a skip!)

Looks like the Carb could well be of a similar mixed blessing.

The furore over welded heads will go on- we do ours cause we have a mate that will weld alloy for beer tokens we dont have access to track time or a rolling road so most of our "setup" is done at the circuit during practice.- so which is more expensive a day on a rolling road dyno or migging some alloy wire into a 2nd hand head and which gives more advantage?

folk will moan if they think someone else has an advantage

And for that reason "Austerity class" is a winner because the stuff that "costs" in terms of set up is taken out....although I'd like to see light flywheels allowed.

Sean

OK, carbs/cams - I understand. But what's the "welded head furore" when it's at home?

The Late Graham Harper reckoned that the machining for the valve seats/guides opened up the inlet track too much and left an ugly stepped area- a dead area just outside the valve where you actually want to be increasing the gas velocity.

finally after a few years of experimenting by himself and his group a solution was found, some of this was shared and other people developed it

2 yrs ago an objection was raised prior to the start of the 24hrs which caused a few problems. The regs say that "you can add OR remove material from the head" the objection was held as, by welding the heads AND then grinding them back was AND not OR ie if you add you can only add if you remove you can only remove.

overall it adds nothing to the peak power it just moves it up or down the rev range.

Sean

So a lot of cylinder head trading goes on between Welders and Machinists?