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Blueprinting basics

3 October, 2025

Just building your engine the way it was supposed to be will unleash smooth power and longevity, then you can port and polish to gain even more
By Jim Richardson

Make sure your engine’s heads and decks are ground flat while the engine is down

You occasionally hear petrol heads tossing around the term ‘blueprinting’ when referring to an engine they have assembled, and have sometimes altered significantly.
What they are probably trying to say is that their engine was carefully machined to optimum tolerances and balanced — probably for racing. But that isn’t what the term meant originally. You see, in the 1950s  when US stock car race cars really had to be stock, the racing teams would go to the factories and rummage through the parts bins until they found components that were closest in tolerance to the original blueprint developed by the engine’s designers.

Install clutch and vibration damper on the crankshaft when you balance it

Producing the best possible engine
They did that because carefully assembling such components would produce the best possible engine, given the original configuration. It worked well, and you can do the same today. Start by finding a good machine shop. And even though you are building a stock engine for a classic, consider the specialty shops that build racing engines to machine your motor. Their services will cost more, but the speed freaks are used to working to exact tolerances.
Also, any engine will benefit from having its rotating assembly balanced. When the pistons and connecting rods weigh exactly the same as one another, and the crankshaft counter-balance weights are drilled or filled to precisely offset the weight and mass of the pistons and connecting rods, the engine will run smoother, rev higher, and last longer.

Weigh each piston and rod to make sure they are all the same

Some good tricks
Don’t forget to take along the flywheel, clutch, and clutch plate, as well as the vibration damper, when you have your engine’s rotating assembly balanced. The flywheel and clutch should always be balanced, and in some cases, the vibration damper should be too. Once everything is properly balanced at the machine shop, you’ll be amazed at how smooth your old engine will idle, and how little — even at high rpm — it will vibrate. 
Another trick that can really make a power difference without doing anything to alter your engine’s appearance is to clean up its intake and exhaust ports. Just cleaning out the roughness and slag in the ports will make a big difference to your engine’s performance. It takes time, plus a high-speed grinder and some abrasive rolls to do it, but it is worth the trouble. The point isn’t to make the ports bigger as much as it is to clean them up to eliminate turbulence. If you want to see how this is done, Google YouTube and type in ‘porting heads for power’ by Jim Richardson.
In addition to removing slag and surface roughness, you can open the valve throats (also called pockets) and clean up and open the port runners to match the openings in the gaskets for additional power. Nothing you can do to most production engines will increase performance as much as pocket porting its heads. But I suggest you practice on a scrap head before you attempt it, or have a good machine shop do the job for you.

When you reassemble your engine, it pays to use new studs and bolts

Valves
Another trick that can help your engine perform better is to do a valve job with a three-way cut.
Start with good-quality valves that can take unleaded, and if required, go to insert valve seats, and have your machinist do a three-way cut to seat the valves. This reduces drag right where it is the biggest problem, and enhances power. The cost is not much greater than a regular valve grind and is worth the trouble.
When assembling the connecting rods and mating the heads to the block, as well as the manifolds to the engine, use new bolts because your old ones may well have been stretched to their elastic limit. Also, when mounting heads to blocks, studs are a better way to go. Studs and nuts have a lot more clamping ability, and they can be torqued in place more evenly because when you tighten a nut on a stud, you aren’t twisting and clamping the stud and nut at the same time, the way you would with a bolt. ARP makes top-quality bolts and studs, and I recommend them highly.
Never use ordinary hardware store bolts when assembling an engine.

Measuring the crankshaft journals to make sure they are correct

NZ Classic Car magazine, September/October 2026 issue 407, on sale now

16 August, 2026

We love bugs!
A bit of TLC that became a major restoration
The 1302S, or ‘Super Beetle’ as it became known, was built for two years before it, too, was replaced by a further-enhanced Beetle, the 1303, continuing an amazing 65-year lineage for one of the World’s best-known shapes.
The world’s best-selling single-model vehicle, the VW Beetle, possibly established another record for the amount of controversy it has created since the inception of the Type 1.
In a meeting with Hitler in June 1934, Ferdinand Porsche was contracted to build a ‘People’s Car’ that could accommodate two adults and three children, was air-cooled and simple to maintain, and could cruise economically at moderate speed along Germany’s proposed new Autobahns.
Our feature car, a 1972 1302S ‘Super Beetle’, was found by Dave and Michelle Dickie in Mosgiel a few years back. It was a runner, but like most VWs of this age, it needed a little TLC. They were looking for a daily driver for Michelle when they first came upon the VW being sold locally on behalf of its owner.
“The owner offered it to his grandchildren, and they didn’t want it, so he got the guy out at Mosgiel in the Mobil petrol station to sell it for him, and he put it on Trade Me for them. We never met the owner, and we were always dealing with the guy at the petrol station. We put a bid on it, and we were the only people that bid on it.”
Their bid was eventually successful, eight years ago. Not knowing much of the history, in situations like that, it’s always a risk buying a car, but they were in for a bit of a surprise.

The other Q car

12 August, 2026

Say the word ‘bond’ to anyone in the street and around 80 per cent straight away think of pop culture’s least-secret secret agent. The other 20 per cent may think of the wad of cash required to secure a flat or hire equipment that one gets back providing the fixtures and fittings stay much as they were.
However, mention ‘bond’ in specialist classic car circles and people will spin a very different yarn. If you dig deep enough, you will find an eccentric British carmaker that, throughout its 23 years in business, spawned some quirky and charming little cars.
The company was founded by Paul Sharp in 1922 under the name of Sharp’s Commercials Limited. However, the company did not start producing cars until 1948. The first car to carry the Bond name was the Bond Minicar. A three-wheeled, soft-top, two-cylinder eco car, the Minicar was a big hit at the time as the desire for an economical urban runabout that didn’t attract four-wheel car tax was strong in post-war Britain. All in all, 34,285 Minicars were produced over 26 years in a variety of variants.