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If you've been around MCM for a hot minute you'll remember Marty "big-block swapping" 2SEXY, and now doing the same thing for their quest to BUILD THE WORLD'S FARTEST MIDGET (CLICK EP1 HERE, and CLICK HERE for EP2).  Our mate David Freiburger loves his big-blocks and explains why they're awesome. "Big-blocks carry a swagger that you just don’t get with any other engine," he says. "Besides, cubes always adds the potential for more power, even boosted. And a 500hp big-block will be more tame and have more torque than a 500hp small-block (assuming the big-block is of greater displacement." So what makes...

Fat-lapping old cars is great fun, but summer cruising in Australia can be a brutally hot, sweaty affair. While aftermarket air conditioning has been around for a fair while a lot of project cars don't have space on the engine for an A/C compressor - thankfully I've found a solution to that which means all project cars can now enjoy frosty cold A/C. Electric compressors are used in EVs and things like truck sleeper cabs, and they replace traditional engine-driven compressors. The engine-mounted compressors run off a belt attached to the engine, which makes their placement critical, and often are the...

THIS VIDEO where the lads pit a BRZ, Golf GTI and Yaris GR against each other on track raised a lot of comments about how each drivetrain does or doesn't work for people. The simple fact is, around the world we all live in wildly different environments; cities versus rural areas, cold or hot climates. Many in the northern hemisphere will run a four-wheel-drive  "winter beater" and a two-wheel-drive car in summer, because snow and ice means the all-paw grip is needed in a life-or-death seriousness.  There are drawbacks to each platform, as all three drivetrain formats have to balance competing...

While it is rad to go to a junkyard today and get an engine which you can then turbocharge using Electro Space Wizard powers to make tar-shredding performance, there are some areas where you can't escape spending money. A wrecking yard diff will handle abuse up to a certain point, but when you start making four-digit power figures you really need to build a differential to suit your car.   In this case we follow Matt Dietrich from Geelong Diff Services (in Geelong, Victoria, in a shocking revelation) as he walks us through how to set-up a bulletproof live-axle rear-end for my...

The junkyard build fad has people ripping engines out of crashed nuggets and slapping them into projects with barely a second look at the engine's health. This can be a huge amount of fun, but sometimes builds get spicier and you need to rebuild the engine. This means you need to visit a "machine shop", which is what I did for the supercharged 6L V8 I put in my '64 Pontiac build (CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO) The start of any engine build is always “machining”, but what does that involve exactly? Basically, an engine relies on finely-measured tolerances and...