Summary

When balancing conrods, where is the best place to remove material? I've seen some conflicting info.

00:00 - James has asked, when balancing conrods, where is the best place to remove material? I've seen some conflicting info.
00:06 Good question and I will cover this, so let me just grab a connecting rod here so we can talk about this.
00:13 OK so this is a typical aftermarket connecting rod.
00:16 And one of the things we'll often see is people balancing the big end of the connecting rod by removing material from these ribs on the cap.
00:25 Now it's a nice easy place to remove material, but unfortunately that's not where we want to remove the material.
00:32 The reason for that is these ribs are actually really important to the rigidity of the cap.
00:37 The actually stop the cap flexing, so we don't want to touch those.
00:41 Instead what we're going to do is place a chamfer on the edge of the conrod where the big end bolts go through.
00:50 And this allows us to remove material without really having any impact on the strength of the conrod or the rigidity of the conrod, that's the essential part.
00:59 There's no use balancing the conrod if we're going to end up producing a conrod that's much weaker or less rigid that stock.
01:07 When it comes to the small end of the conrod, this gets a little bit trickier.
01:10 What we're going to do is use a linisher to do this and what we're going to do is just gently and evenly linish around the outside diameter of the small end of the conrod.
01:20 It's really important here that we remove a minimal amount of material and we want to remove that as evenly as possible around the entire outside diameter.
01:29 The other thing we don't want to do when we're linishing the conrod is we don't wanna concentrate our linisher in one place for too long and end up over heating the conrod.
01:38 if we go too far in that respect, we discolour the conrod, this can also have an effect on the heat treatment of the conrod.
01:45 So there's a few tips that need to be taken into account there.
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