Man hours needed to rebuild engine?

[H-viken]

I’m trying to estimate the cost of a rebuild and since labor cost varies geographically I’m curious about the hours spent by a professional instead;

How many man hours would you say are needed to rebuild a longblock (from tear down back to assembled)?

How many man hours does it generally take to completely rebuild and clean a pair of carbs?

To that you add work at the machine shop and parts. Parts are pretty straight forward, but how about machine shop costs? In 2003 Wayne, in his book, had them estimated at ca $3,600. Although that’s almost 20 years ago now.

Anything else to consider?

Johan

[gsxrken]

Having just rebuilt my 3.3 earlier this year, and having been around the air cooled scene now for 18 years, I’d say 45-50 hours is an average number. It’s a ****-ton of work and god forbid there’s an issue. For a complete overhaul with P&Cs the labor is a minority of the total cost; you can almost look at paying a pro to do it as a hedge against leaks or all those expensive parts.

[ahh911]

40-50 hours, wow, that would be amazing. I can't see this done for less than 10-15k, labor, whatever the time involved, it's more a work to proper results oriented job. Maybe I'm in dreamland or something else.

Phil

[dannobee]

Depending on the year, emissions equipment and whether it was a turbo or not, book time varied from 40 to 60 hours. The common quote was 60 hours.

[47silver]

if you had all of the parts laid out in a very large space in the order that they are to be installed and they required no measuring or decisions it would still take 40 hours.
so 80 hours is not unreasonable
if you do it yourself and you tally every moment that you spend on the engine, buying parts, making decisions, measuring and measuring again, oh and cleaning, and cleaning and painting the tin, getting the correct hose and clamps, seals, bearings , rings, jb welding, looking up torques,,
easy 200 hours.

[Jeff Alton]

Depends on how detailed you want to get. We have the proper parts washers, blast cabinets, and Jet Wash in our shop. We quote 45 hours but spend closer to 60 hours when we include all of the detailed cleaning we do even with the equipment we have doing the basic work automatically for us.

The disassembly and assembly take the least amount of time. Cleaning, measuring, that is what takes the lion's share.

Cheers

[H-viken]

Thank you for your input!

So if we say 60 hours from disassembly to assembled longblock (including cleaning, measuring etc) is that fair?

How many hours for a pair of carbs?

Then a general cost for the standard machine work required in connection with the rebuild of the longblock, what is a ballpark number?

[r lane]

What's a rebuild. Are we including head studs, broken exhaust studs. Are doing the heads or sending them out

[H-viken]

Originally Posted by r lane

What's a rebuild. Are we including head studs, broken exhaust studs. Are doing the heads or sending them out

Some of that work, such as refurbishing the heads, Wayne included under “Machine shop” section. I.e it’s included in the $3,600 above

[88911coupe]

Took me A YEAR! LOL, It was therapy and a really enjoyed it. There are so many variables depending on what you run into it's hard to say. It may be more effective to estimate hours of each section, such as tear down, measurement of pistons, cylinders, cams, etc. Then you run into what has to be done with the cylinder heads...all the variables have variables. Bottom line...IT DEPENDS.

[Flat6pac]

It’s not how many hours, it’s what’s the return time from the machinist that drags the time out.
Bruce