Steve Dulcich on building a budget 318

YY1 said
I've thrown many a magazine across the restroom in disgust when reading a "budget" build article, when I got to the part about "we had this cam and this differential laying around, so they were basically free".

Well, out the window, then...

Agreed! Laying around? Someone paid for it!
Unless the part was given to me or traded, there is a price to it that needs to be added in and tallied up on the total. A mention of, the price paid with the notation of what it would cost new should be added in IMO. Heck! I state that I have Hooker Super Comp 1-3/4 headers on my B body. I paid a whopping $330. Is that cheap? Today it is but not when I purchased them brand new!

Icetech said
Yeah.. one guy i follow (actually good youtube channel and a good guy doing **** right) got sent thousands in parts and has less than 10k followers (at the time) it's like... damn i need to start a channel :) "Hello, Ray Barton..... i can get you 5000 views for the low cost of a 572!" :)

LMAO! Awesome!

Big.J.007 said
Again this goes back to the statement of average Joe on a budget. Average Joe isn't getting all these unheard of parts for nothing and saying he built a 10k engine for 1k bucks. It's a pipe dream.

No doubt!

DFX 340 Duster said
I ran out of money on my first budget build. The machine shop work to clean up the cylinders and get new pistons drained my “budget”. I ended up building the motor piece by piece over time as I was able to save money to buy the parts that I needed. That was back in 1977 when I had to use friends, the junkyard, and swap meets to obtain what I wanted.

Nowadays, the “budget” should be stated such as $500 or $2000 or $10,000.

Abhhhh the old days I miss as well. I used to know many people in the junk yards. We did each other favors a lot. One day I crossed paths with an import yard that had a ‘79 Z-28. I needed the whole HVAC system and then threw the nose on top of everything. Total cost in ‘90/91 was a whopping $100.

Of course this guy also took all my junk away for free. I did t care. Please take my garbage away! He was the guy that took this man’s garbage and turned into coin for his pocket. I was good with that.

So when that Z-28 showed up, he remembered me and my free of charge donations. We had a great relationship.

In a sense the parts were free and in a sense they were not.
How does one calculate that? IDK!