After Christmas or a birthday I like to build something to keep me occupied which has become a bit of tradition. This year was no different, this time I was lucky enough to have an expensive engine model kit to play with. This ‘Techning V8 Engine Kit (DM118)’ kit was something I had been looking at for quite a while, but just couldn’t bring myself to pay the considerable amount of £500 for a model kit. However, that is exactly what I got as a gift from my wife and my better half. Although I’m convinced that it was to keep me out of the way for a few days to be honest!

I have reviewed this Techning V8 Engine Kit with full step by step build and instruction guide here. Or you can just copy and paste this link below into your browser:

https://onemanandhismustang.com/teching-v8-engine-kit-dm118/

It’s a long step by step build guide and review, which has taken me a good number of hours to complete. During my research for a kit like this I was looking around for an accurate review from the average Joe on what the model was actually like. I didn’t want a sponsored review giving a one sided favourable response. For that amount of money I wanted an independent build and review, if you were wondering what such a review looks like – I have done it myself.

There were many steps to this build, but I wont go into them all here, otherwise I may just as well copy the review. What I will do is show the more interesting and technical parts of the build.

The kit itself came in metal tin which weighs in at over 4kg! Inside there was three layers of aluminium anodised parts, a manual and plastic building mat, totalling to a little over six hundred and fifty pieces in total.

For the number of parts supplied you need to take into account that each screw or bolt or Allen bolt is counted as a part. So for a valve set that consists of thirty two valves, each with four parts to make the valve – that’s one hundred and twenty eight parts right there. With a few hundred screws on top of that there is much to actually build with engine parts as such. The supplied tools were OK, which consisted of four Allen keys and small cheap cross headed screwdriver. But, I used a precision screwdriver with various bits to get a more accurate control and feel. As the tweezers and fine needle nosed pliers were metal to metal contact I used some heat shrink tubing on the tips to protect the kit parts.

The pistons needed con rods, piston heads and fitting to the crank at the bottom of the engine block. The supplied little pots of lube is a light grease and is needed where any metal to metal contact is made.

The valves needed to be assembled and inserted into the block, all with independent, valve seals, springs and tappets and their own up and down motion. All of them need to be free moving so that the overhead cams can open and close the valves a millimetre or two.

Once the valves are in place a cam seat is required to partially cover the valve stems and allow the mounting of the twin over head cams. There will be two timing chains, so to make them work their are pairs which need to staggered via spacers on each side of the engine block.

The exhausts are fitted to each side of the engine and then the heads are bolted to the top of the engine block.

The back of the kit holds a large flywheel and and starter motor which drives the kit. The front of the kit has a cover even has a proper timing mark.

The timing chains was a bit of a mission to get right, as the bottom crank sprocket and the cams all needed to be correctly aligned via their ‘dots’ before the tensioning guides are fitted and adjusted into place.

There are belt tensioning guides, alternator, water pump, belt guides and crank pullies, oil filter and intake manifold all need to be installed.

There is a nice touch of a couple of rubber belts that are located on the front pullies and need to be installed in the correction orientations and tensioned to enable the passive pullies be turned when the kit runs.

The electrics are controlled by a box which allows for on/off/on via the battery or a powered connection.

The kit takes around two hours to charge with a running time of one and half hours (allegedly). The finished kit looks amazing even when it’s not running.

I created a video of the model working which I will at some point upload to YouTube, hence it has my branding on it ready. With the kit running you can see the pistons moving through the side of the engine block, the valves operating, the water pump moving and the pullies rotating.

This is a seriously expensive model and I would seriously cast a luxury item. In fact that I have paid considerably less for a proper running full sized road legal car. Once they were due for an MOT I just took to them to a scrap yard then bought another. I fact one of my cars was nicknamed ‘Bellamy’ after the famous botanist ‘David Bellamy‘ He was a lovely bloke and spoke of the ‘undergrowth’ or ‘wildlife’. That car had plenty of mould and growths in places that there shouldn’t have things growing on it. It had a full length soft sun roof that leaked like a sieve. But, at that time of my life I was just grateful to have a car, and I use the term ‘car’ in the loosest of terms!

I enjoyed spending a good few hours building that kit across a few days, it took about ten hours in total and almost as long to write about it. I was a surprised to see the gift from my wife and surprised she got it for me as there are a few cheap plastic knock offs of this kit. She did confess that she had seen it pop up on a few feeds when she used my PC that I use here to create my blog. She did really well by getting the right one and especially not paying the full price for it, hence that’s why she got it.

Looking forward to more builds, although I have a the full sized Mustang that needs a couple of little bits that I need to do on it. I will be sharing that with you all before the car show gets underway.