well, asking for a friend. i mean, for real, asking for a friend. Not my car. The car got major oil problem and the crankshaft was toast, some con rod pin's diameters are off by 0.08mm,, according to the service manual, its no longer salvageable. So I was wondering if buying a new crankshaft is the only way to go. The crankshaft is very very expensive like not a lot less than $10,000. In other marques, we can use +0.1, +0.2 bearings to get them into specs, but alas, ferrari doesn't have any of these kind of bearings. Also in the service manual, it says Nitriding depth (measured at HV=525) = 0.3 - 0.35 mm. Does this mean the maximum grinding depth is less than 0.3mm? Over that, we'll have a different material?
I have seen short blocks on Ebay for half of that. That could be a better option. Call a few suppliers and see what they have. No sense in paying 10k for a crank when you can get a whole engine for that price. Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk
EBay has complete short and long engines for $10k Also dig a little with the parts houses, because the Maserati engines are from the same family and may have applications where you can re-bush the rods. It would not surprise me if the Ferrari/Maserati parts are the same but with more availability on the Maserati side as they produced more than the Ferrari side. For example, you can get a complete Maserati 4.3 engine on FLEEbay for $4k. However, easiest would probably be a used short block with a tested good crank, and rebuild the original motor and keep the rest as a spare or part it out if you have the time and patience to recoup unused parts cost Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
it was 5000 British pound. translating to 6k USD, then add tarrif and shipping anyway, even if it is 5k pounds, it is still a lot
Actually I don't think that's too bad for a flat plane V8 crank and given the original purchase price of the car, but if you want a cheaper option you have several options: 1) Take the risk on a used engine. It's a bit of a lottery though; 2) Have yours re-ground and re-nitrided (yes it's OK); 3) Contact somebody who makes steel cranks. I recently had a completely bespoke crank made for a long-stroke 4 cyl application and it was £1500 / $1800. Have you checked the rest of the engine? Lifter bores, cam journals, bore ovality etc... it may be much more than just the mains and small ends...
other parts of the engine were taken care of, just bearings and nothing else were actually need replacing. yea, now I think we need to find a re-nitriding company in China.
The nitriding is a hardening coat- if you can recover the bearing surface by grinding and still have a reasonable hard coat left you just might be able to use it. Just depends how much you have to remove, but can you get O/Size bearings. For the crank to be at a fail state, then you must have a lot more damage- the engine is going to need a full rebuild- a low miles swap is going to be a cheaper option i think
What? Fake engine oil? 20 years ago, I used to know a guy who made bearings. If that service is still available, it would be less expensive than a new crank. But crank work of any kind is still expensive.
yes, fake engine oil. Its not the first engine i've seen damaged due to bad oil in China. I am so concerned about the rampant fake oil in china I started to import redline oils from calfornia myself already. Double the price I could have locally but guaranteed to be genuine.
im also concerned about crank balance if we grind too much off it, for example, 0.5mm, which means the hardening surface's gone already anyways( 0.3mm depth of nitriding hardening)
That's just insane to me. It's definitely worth it to import, small price to pay for peace of mind and risk of losing an engine.
You can nitride again if needed (assuming you can find the right bearings), contact a local heat treater who does this. The base material is steel and will have a lower hardness below the nitride layer. Good luck!
HolyF. It was around £1,092 back in 2011 (I double checked the invoice to be sure!). Amazing what 8+ years does (to be fair, in 2011, the F430 was just fresh from the last production).