banzaitoyota

I tore my Pineapple down yesterday. I found nothing major, just a bunch of "questionable" items. I will post pics later

BTW: when Rob says "Minor clean-up port" He means that, I doubt if he spent all of 10 minutes with a grinder on ALL my plates combined.

j9fd3s

this is why i build my own motors. well actually everytime i let someone else do it its taken at least 5 years....

badass7

Art, the FULL history of this rotor and housing will explain the pics. clearly. The same guy who built this engine did mine and I stand behind him 100%. As you saw after Steve's tuning of my engine, everything points to the outstanding job this guy has done on my engine. This same guy has built a countless # of kick *** motors all over the country and has been racing competitively and building engines for 9 years. He is an individual builder who has no reason to try and rip people off as he is in it for the love of building motors and for the sport of racing Rotaries. He will respond on THIS thread with the details of what went down.

twstdmtl

^^ So be good! For goodness sake!^^

BDC

VERY interesting topic. Since I'm in the market as a modifier and engine builder targetting more on the performance side of things, this struck my attention. Even looking at this as an enthusiast, business aside, I find there tends to be a fairly big difference between large shops and guys that do this more on their own on a smaller scale (Judge Ito, myself, Don Marvel, several others, etc.).



In a practical business model, you've got three major factors that come into play here. In a perfect world, all three of these would be at 100%, 100% of the time. As the real world dictates, however, only two of the three will ever be good while the third is left out in the cold or neglected. Those three factors are Quality of Product & Service, Timeliness in delivery of product & service, and Price.



-) Large-scale shops and high dollar operations tend to do very well with Timeliness in product/service delivery, moderately with pricing, and poorly with quality of product. I think what the original poster is getting at here is emphasized by this. I've seen it time and again myself; it's probably one of the biggest reasons, besides being an enthusiast and having a personal interest, why I chose to do things on my own. Even though their strength lies with the number of labourers working to churn their product out on a timely manner (usually), they tend to be too expensive for the average guy and also tend towards lesser quality work.



-) Guys like me, Ito, and a score of others that work alone (keyword here; we tend not to employ anyone else and do everything ourselves) and do this as a means for a living pretty much invariably excel on Quality of product and service (I think the largest reason behind this is because it's just us, ourselves, doing all of the work instead of having to deal with quality control or other groups doing "their chunk" or portion of work), we do fairly well on pricing (we lack the overhead so we're not as much 'under the gun' to charge a comparable rate for labour and work that a large-scale operation would do on average), but tend to not do as well when it comes to timeliness on the delivery (since there's usually only one, maybe two of us working on something at a time).



Differing from larger operations, we usually tend to shine when it comes to the quality aspect also because of the personal relationships that are built between us and the customer; more attention and care is given to the work and labour perform to better suit the customer's personal expectations instead of it being more about just earning and buck and flipping another project over. I think this is why we tend to see better stuff from private entrepreneurs over those of the shops that do the exact same work. When you've got 14 guys working on the same thing, I think it makes it easier to louse things up and also doesn't endear to personal care that's taken. That's my opinion on it.



I think the focus and intent of this thread is right-on and I think it's the right idea. However, as with everything that comes down to pointing a criticizing figure at a business entity, care has to be taken so as to prevent it from marching into something slanderous. Adequate proof and evidence have to be given and hopefully the party that's being blamed for bad work (in this case) needs to have the opportunity to defend themselves. I don't know how Vosko or the other moderators feel about this but I think it's a good idea, generally speaking.



I'm not personally afraid of it concerning my own work. I feel that I do good work so I'm not threatened. However, I'm not above criticism or reproof and I know that I've got to continue to increase my own skills to provide a better product and service so I don't have an issue if someone has a problem with or question about anything I've done for them.



My comments on the first porting and other pictures posted -> VERY lousy work and no attention to detail or care given there at all. Whoever did the work needs to change jobs.



B

BDC

Agreed. Whomever did the porting work didn't know what they were doing. Their work was VERY sloppy and didn't appear to be uniform.



But, you know, those kinds of guys tend to not care -> wanna know why? They'll never see you (the customer) and they figure that the customer will never know what's on the inside of this engine because they figure that you'll never tear it apart to see their work up-close.



This is _the very reason_ why I take pictures of everything I do for people.



B

BDC

The surface rust in the port runner and outlet is what's called "flash rust"; that happens very quickly after finishing a port job on the irons. The freshly exposed & raw iron quickly begins to flash rust. This is further accelerated and exacerbated when the irons sit outside in the weather (for some reason unbeknownced to me). I've yet to find a decent way to prevent this but I've been thinking about either applying a light coat of vaseline or perhaps WD40 or something shortly after finishing a port job.



B

tampaFD

wd-40 is common in piston engine rebuild for prevention of rust on finished iron. nasa did make and call it water displacement formula 40

White_FC

IIRC, it was actually their 40th attempt at making a water displacement formula work??



Anyway, slightly more on topic, the first motor I pulled down (shat apex seal) i found some real interesting things, the intermediate iron had REALLY rough porting, looked horid.. and all the corner seals on that side of the rotor were chewed up and all of them cracked in at least two pieces..



Unfortunatly Im not sure what company did the porting, as i bought it dead from a mate..

but still goes to show its not a very localised occurance..

93BlackFD

i have pics of my blown pineapple motor, but rob wouldn't let me take pictures of the port job....



now i'm sorta pissed that he wouldn't let me