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Good afternoon all, I've got a question that has lingered with me for many years. Not sure why I didn't ask someone knowledgeable before, but here goes. When I had the connecting rods in my 230 balanced many years, as part of the rebuild, the machinist said the rod weights were so far off from each other that he had to take off a LOT of meat from some of them, and boy, he sure did. He completely removed the ribs from the caps on a couple of those rods. This alarmed me, as it seems that those ribs are there for strength. The 230 rods are different from rods I see on other engines, which usually have pads on the caps, and those pads don't contribute to the structural strength of the cap, and metal can be removed from those. I ended up getting another set of rods and taking them to a different machinist, who removed only a little material from the ribs. I never had an issue in running this second set of rods in my engine, but I only put less than 10,000 miles on the engine before removing it for other problems. So, my question is: Is it a big deal to thin down those ribs in order to balance the rods? Is that the purpose of those ribs? Or will this be weakening the caps and asking for a trashed engine when a cap fails and a rod and piston fly out of the block? Also, are the bigger engines - 251 and 265 - also set up this way, meaning with ribs? Or do they have actual pads? Thanks, Matt
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