Cool pic

I have not seen them yet side by side - just heard about them from former Sealed Power customers - there is a hint on quality right there....

The flat rounded circle in the top pic is what the Malden, MO plant (RIP) used as the index position for all subsequent machining - it was the first cut made on a casting. Pin bores were perpendicular to that surface as were ring grooves. Skirt profiles and any dome machining were referenced to that flat as well.

Since the India part has not used it in there casting it tells us quite a bit. One is that they are using the machining of a functional surface such as a ring groove or pin bore as their initial reference. Normally you would want the first cut to be a non-functional surface since it's nigh to impossible to insure it's location accuracy when fixturing to the rough casting. That's the reason you'll normally see dowel pin locations on complex parts like blocks and heads.

The next thing we learn is that the India part is a completely new casting. For whatever reason they chose to completely discard the Malden tooling and patterns, and are not working from the Malden prints for anything beyond the major dimensionals like bore and pin sizing. The parts we made in the USA were developed and refined over twenty years of production, with innumerable enginering changes to fix any issues that arose over those years. We are back to square one here - and we as customers are the development team since nobody in India will ever own an FE. It might work just fine - but it seems a risk with no reward to discard all that prior development work.

I'm certain that the labor cost of that piston dropped by at least 50%, and I know for a fact that labor was roughly 50% of the total cost on that product line. Did they reduce the price since they were last available by - oh 15% to share the benefits? Didn't think so.....

Barry Rabotnick
Survivalmotorsports.com