Hardened factory rods vs billet rods?

Lewis6030

Lewis6030

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How are rods that have been hardened and cyro'd holding up vs billet. Obviously I know that billet is probably the best option, but there's a pretty big price difference between the two. Are billet really worth the extra dollars?
 
Pay the money once and it will cost you less later...

we just broke a rod at about 1200hp and...broke the hamilton cam, one aries piston, hamilton extreme pushrods, bent valves in our hamilton head, block, crank...

it would have been cheaper to have had rods in it the forst time around
 
Depends on what you're doing. They can be a complete waste of money, or they can be a absolute requirement.
 
YoungDiesel27 said:
Pay the money once and it will cost you less later...

we just broke a rod at about 1200hp and...broke the hamilton cam, one aries piston, hamilton extreme pushrods, bent valves in our hamilton head, block, crank...

it would have been cheaper to have had rods in it the forst time around
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Ouch! That's no good. I know the feeling though.. At the very last pull last season the tractor had miss, so We pulled the injectors over the winter and sent them off to get checked.. Ended up being 5 bent rods and all 6 pistons were burnt up lol not a good find at all.
 
I ran the hardened stock rods in my unlimited single/3.0 truck for 6 years with no issues until last year. Engine was 5k or higher all the time ( probably 200+ passes). I switched this year to Carrillo's because I had 1 of them stretch the beam .008 compared to the rest which were all within .001 of each other. Some get them to live and some don't.
 
Why would high rpm make them last longer? I would think the more rpm the harder it is on them
 
Lewis6030 said:
Why would high rpm make them last longer? I would think the more rpm the harder it is on them
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Less torque.

As you can see that Jeremy had stretched one of his, and that is the trade off. Swinging a heavy piston at high RPM.
 
Lewis6030 said:
Why would high rpm make them last longer? I would think the more rpm the harder it is on them
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zstroken said:
Less torque.

As you can see that Jeremy had stretched one of his, and that is the trade off. Swinging a heavy piston at high RPM.
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TQ kills parts hands down. Want a engine to live? Keep it above 5k all the time. Want it to explode? Get it down where it makes its max TQ and beat on it there for a few hooks. Cylinder pressure increases as rpm goes down.
 
What do you consider "high" rpms?

When building the new engine, I gave the billet/hardened/stock rods issue some thought. It's just a street toy that sees some track use and under a 1000hp, so it was hard to justify billet rods. I thought about hardened, but decided that I'd rather bend/stretch one instead breaking it, so I skipped hardening.

Engine should be mid 900s on fuel and I plan on running it mostly in the 3500-4200 rpm range. Do I have a reasonable chance of the rods lasting?
 
I'm gonna go with a set of CPP's hardened rods. Jamie says he's got them in a bunch if pullers and trucks over 1600hp without a failure so I think my sub 1000hp build will be fine. I plan to have ot tuned to keep the torque up higher.
 
The guys claiming big hp numbers out of hardened rods are running them over 5k rpms. Imo anything above 1200 hp and under 4500 rpm is hard on rods...also dependent on the recipe used to make that hp
 
At what point would you want billet over hardend treated rods for 5.9, 6.7, daily driver, play toy...?
 
dixon700 said:
I'm gonna go with a set of CPP's hardened rods. Jamie says he's got them in a bunch if pullers and trucks over 1600hp without a failure so I think my sub 1000hp build will be fine. I plan to have ot tuned to keep the torque up higher.
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I'd be interested in a list of pullers over 1600 HP and what class they run in.

Surely CPP doesn't supply hardened rods for several top tier mod class pullers because we all know 2.6 and the vast majority of 3.0 pullers are not making in excess of 1600 HP at the flywheel.
 
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