Much like a house, an engine is only as good as its foundation and that foundation is the block. There has been a pretty interesting surge in new blocks hitting the market or at least debuting over the last coupe of months. SEMA saw some interesting developments on that front and PRI brought out another crop of aluminum and iron hunks that are designed to give you the best possible start for your high performance engine build. Some of these are refinements on existing blocks and others are brandy new but the one thing they all have in common are improvements over existing designs.

It’s funny. When you are a kid and you see an engine block for the first time you wonder how ANYTHING could possible ruin a hunk of pig iron like that…and than you get a little older and kill one or three and start to understand, right? The manufacturers who are producing these pieces put a lot of experience and engineering behind them. Let’s take a look and maybe you’ll see something you are interested in using to base your next engine off of . Ford, GM, and Mopar fans all have an option to gawk at here, so pay attention!

Ford –

Here’s the Titus Performance Cleveland Ford block in the semi-raw state. As you can see below you can hog this thing all the way out to a 4.20 bore and they can go as tall as 9.7″ on the tech height if you really want to build a large by huge displacement version of the Cleveland in this familiar looking package. One of these blocks was getting finished machined on machinery row. It was cool to watch. This is an iron option for anyone out there looking to go whole hog on a serious Cleveland build.

MOPAR –

The Gen III Hemi has been making great inroads into the sport of drag racing. They power fast radial cars, they power the fastest factory showdown cars in the world right now and there is no signs of that trend slowing. In fact, with this new aluminum drag race block from FCA, it’ll probably increase. Saving 100lbs off the weight of a cast iron block and designed to not only take stock Gen III hemi parts but they have provisions for additional machining for stroker cranks and the like as well. If you are going to screw together a a serious Gen III engine, you may want to start here.

GM stuff –

The interesting thing about the GM blocks we saw was the fact that one is basically a reproduction stocker and the other is a high performance legend. They are both made by the same company, World Products.

The stocker is a factory replacement 8.1L block, designed to drop right in where factory engines lived in pickup trucks, medium duty trucks, and wherever else 8.1L engines were installed. The last of the big blocks offered by GM, the 8.1 does not seem to have a huge performance backing behind it, which is kind of weird but this product is the ticket if you are in the market to build yourself a fresh and warmed up 8.1L engine for your application

The second block is the vaunted World Products Merlin. One of the most popular aftermarket blocks for motorsports and high performance street engines, the Merlin has been around for some time but World is not sitting still on it. They revised nearly everything for this fourth generation of the Merlin. Thicker main webs and thicker cylinder walls means a tougher platform to make ridiculous horsepower with. Check them out below.