This seems an appropriate place to share my latest experience with one of these rebuilders(not the one mentioned). Had a customer buy 2 of the 400 HP 383's to replace his tired 6.2s. They came with a 7 year warranty. He brought them to me to dyno and tune. On the dyno they smoked and only made 350 HP. He put them in the boat and ran it for a couple of hours. He called me back and said they were using oil like crazy and brought them in for me to fix. Here's what I found when I pulled them apart. Scat 3.75 cast crank, KB Hyper pistons. Those are the only parts that were as represented. The rods were the old style 350 with stock bolts. The cams were hydraulic rollers that were reground stock cams with .530 lift. The heads were stock vortec, so the retainers smashed the valve seals. Additionally they replaced the valves with the older style that have 2 grooves, one for the keeper and one for an O ring. The second groove would drop into the valve seal, further breaking it. There was tons of debris in the engines, pistons and bearings seriously scored.
I built him new engines and all is well, but he lost a ton of money. He asks me on our test run what kind of warranty they had. My reply was, "well you know what good a 7 year warranty did you, if these screw up
we'll fix em" That's our reputation on the line and custom builders don't stay in business screwing people.
Bob Lloyd
Full Throttle Marine
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