Waterblock Shootout - III

For what it's worth...

I'd actually prefer that manufacturers send blocks with decent lapping, regardless of whether their typical product is well lapped or not.

I certainly don't think Bill should be doing the lapping. However, comparison of blocks, whose bases are substantially worse than the average forum participant can easily achieve, deprives me of information I am really interested in. Just my $0.02.

On another topic.

Having thought about it some; I am somewhat more interested in seeing the results of mods to blocks for which Bill has baseline data, than in the results for DIY blocks. In a lot of cases it would be easier to sort out distinct factors of block performance, as Bill found with his MCW462 inlet mods.

Bill, would you do the testing on modded commercial blocks for the DIY'er price?

I certainly don't think modded blocks should be eligible for JoeC's contest. But possibly testing subsidies by interested parties?

I'm leaning towards dropping the whole member supported contest idea. Doesn't seem to be much interest. (At least by people willing to donate.) I still think the subsidy idea is very worthwhile, and would be happy to support testing of interesting concepts.

JessFM, I think it would be great if you sponsored some sort of mod contest. (Assuming Bill would be willing to test modded blocks.) I don't know how many of your blocks are here in the US or how likely European users would be to ship their blocks here for testing by Bill. That could be an issue with how well such a contest worked, if it was limited to your designs.

sure, same procedure (wrt my time), same price

I'm thinking there will be considerable resistance on the part of (most ?) wb mfgrs to having to pay for data

as one put it to me; for the same price they could send out 10 wbs to 'reviewers', who don't know anything and can't test anything, but get much more mileage with the 'avg' WCer (in terms of sales)

and modded wbs won't mean anything w/o a baseline
- well, not really true either
as we accumulate data the relative rankings will be more and more informative

wrt the 'contest'
JoeC has already offered such on a limited basis, should be sufficient I'd think
and the selection of 'best' has 2 components:
the performance, for which there are real numbers; and the eye appeal, which depends on the viewer

is a 'big' prize going to attract substantially more wbs than JoeC's potential reimbursement of the testing cost ?
- not so sure on that one

be cool

Since87
all is not as it seems with hand lapping, its easy to do poorly -> as most are now doing
though some factory bps are so bad a disk grinder would improve them
(joking, but some are NOT good)

BillA said:

sure, same procedure (wrt my time), same price

Click to expand...

Glad to hear it. May be sending you a block someday. I hope others with interesting mods will do so also.

BillA said:

all is not as it seems with hand lapping, its easy to do poorly -> as most are now doing
though some factory bps are so bad a disk grinder would improve them
(joking, but some are NOT good)

Click to expand...

Looking forward to hearing what you have to say on it.

However, I think that with a few bananas, I could train a monkey to lap a base better than one I've seen.

If I was a consumer, I would prefer to see the block tested how I would get it.... keep that in mind