Mahle Turbo Pistons

[icanfixall]

Well, After working for about a week talking with almost every engineer at Mahle and way too many distribution wharehouses here in Ca. I finally found a machine shop that could order me a set of 144180HAWR std pistons. :Sly They cost about $1100.00 but I got what I feel I needed. They have the hard anodized tops and are the large pin size. I toured the shop just to "see" what they are capable of doing in the machining process. I feel really good about what I saw and will be having them do all my machining block work. I may have them look at the porting work I did on my new offshore heads because they do several "grades" of porting work from mild to wild. P.S. They told me of a machine shop about 8 miles from me that grinds cams. It seems only about 3 foundries in the country will cast cam blanks and this is a shop that grinds for most of the bigger cam "manufactors accross the US. Funny what a person finds in their backyard.....

 

[Ironman03R]

Cool. Keep us posted on how that works out, I'm looking to do something like what your doing with a rebuild. If you can get a custom cam ground I may be interested in one too.

 

[TLBREWER]

Well, After working for about a week talking with almost every engineer at Mahle and way too many distribution wharehouses here in Ca. I finally found a machine shop that could order me a set of 144180HAWR std pistons. :Sly They cost about $1100.00 but I got what I feel I needed. They have the hard anodized tops and are the large pin size. I toured the shop just to "see" what they are capable of doing in the machining process. I feel really good about what I saw and will be having them do all my machining block work. I may have them look at the porting work I did on my new offshore heads because they do several "grades" of porting work from mild to wild. P.S. They told me of a machine shop about 8 miles from me that grinds cams. It seems only about 3 foundries in the country will cast cam blanks and this is a shop that grinds for most of the bigger cam "manufactors accross the US. Funny what a person finds in their backyard.....

This winter I'm planning on getting a core and building as bulletproof an engine as I can. So educate me on the differences between the Mahle pistons you've selected and standard rebuild kit pieces. I see they are coated and have larger wrist pins. I haven't found much written information on different internal components for the IDI's. I want to know if it is beneficial enough in the long run to get the best pieces parts (and what they are) compared to a standard off the shelf rebuild kit. At $1400 just for a rebuild kit, I'm thinking I might as well spend the extra to get exactly what I want. I just don't know what that is. Fel Pro gaskets instead of generics for example. Camshafts are another example of "no-one makes it" kind of mentallity. Granted I don't want to spend $10K on an engine, but if it costs me half again as much or so for the "right" pieces, that's worth it in my opinion.

Tom