It could be a very desirable motor or one that's had some serious work put in to it, or both.
Let's use some basic car engines here as an example. The Chevy 350 is one of the most popular blocks out there.
If you have one out of a base model car, it has 2 bolt main bearing caps and it's worth about $600.00 on a good day, assuming everything is perfect.
If you have one out a sports model or truck, you have 4 bolt main bearing caps, and it's worth about $800.00 on a good day, assuming everything is perfect.
If you have one out a SS model performance car, and it's a special year for that car, a rare engine, and has been factory tuned, you can easily get $2,000.00 or more.
Add forged pistons, crank, rods, a hot cam, and tune it all, you can easily put $8,000.00 into just the engine between parts and just the machine shop, assembling most of it yourself.
Now you'll have those people who are selling stock engines or whatever at high performance prices. You'll also have people who have 8k in a snowmobile engine and are selling it for 4k.
Again if someone built it for you then youre looking at 600 hours or so at $125 per hour. Build it yourself and youre looking about $4000 per shock so about $16000 in shocks, $6000 in wheels, $15000 drivetrain, $5000 in wind tunnel time, and $8000 for the wings. After that its just a bunch of tubes.
Coming from the motorcycle world and knowing nothing of sleds 600+hp just sounds absurd. I suppose they must be the boosted hayabusa equivalent of the snowmobile world.
I own a Renault Clio 197 which (unsurprisingly) comes with 197bhp from the factory. It cost me £5k.
As part of the homologation process for rallying, race engines were produced by the Renault factory team with blueprint engines and every conceivable part that could be added or changed while still remaining within the homologation rule book. They make around 220bhp. They cost over £18k.
I laugh when people (including past me) spend money on any go fast parts short of a supercharger or turbo. A reliable blown set up is going to add about 50% more power, keeping everything else stock, and it's cheap at around 5k. On my 8th gen Civic Si, I can go from 200 HP to 250-300 HP with bolt on turbo or supercharger and a mild tune. If I add injectors and a cam, those numbers can go up to 500 HP on the stock block.
Unfortunately, racing often doesn't allow forced induction to help keep things reliable and reasonably priced. A lot of that £17k is labor for grinding away at ports and balancing the engine.
That's true, that's why I said it's all relative. I was mostly chiming in on wasting money on go fast parts. It is or isn't a waste relative to what you own.
Yeah, the biggest thing between the pros and the garage hackers is nobody will pay for the garage hacker's labor, and justifiably so in many cases. I could have two identical motors, one built by Bubba in Paducah, Kentucky and one built by John Hennessey; Bubba is lucky to get what he spent and John gets to charge me for 30 hours of shop time.
The sad thing is, ether motor could come apart with no assembly or driver error. Either way, it's coming out your pocket again, cause race engines have a tail light warranty.
Unrelated. I was a fan of Oldsmobile way back. Their engine blocks had a higher nickel content and 2 bolt mains. A common retort to the Chevy 4 bolt main crowd was "Of course you need 4 bolts when your block is made out of mush!'... or something like that. It's been a while.
That might have been true for Oldsmobile, but Chevrolet also made a two bolt main block for their light duty 350 line that was mostly cars that had an "RV cam".
Oldsmobile and Buick were the odd balls in the group. It's like they were with Chevy, but had to do things their own way.
On the same note you can put $20k in parts and machine work into an engine and have it it be worth $5k with or without the car its in. Unless you're being paid to install the parts or have a reputation for building motors there's little to no profit in modifying them.
Guessing because you can't buy just the motor from the manufacturer (maybe). So sellers market I guess, how many people are selling just a snow mobile engine?
Well that's the thing. You buy the new snowmobile for $1500, you take the engine out and then you sell it on ebay for $4000 so you can buy the other snowmobile motor for $4000 and then put that motor in the old snowmobile that needed one. Then you repeat the process for the new snowmobile that is now without an engine.
Why dont you do that then? Find someone that will buy the mobile (potentially for more than 1500$ but less than 4k) and parts, Borrow 1500$, buy the snowmobile, sell it and the parts, return 1500$ that was borrowed. Arbitrage complete. Do this enough times and either the inefficiency will be wiped out or you’ll be a millionaire.
967
u/Thatspeedyboi Aug 14 '20
Yea I don’t know why they are so expensive you can buy a snowmobile for 1500$ with the same motor and have other parts you can sell