![]() ![]() The rebuilt Buick Nailhead now features Egge pistons, Grant rings, a Melling camshaft and Melling lifters, an SA Gear timing kit, Sealed Power and Clevite bearings, and an OE crankshaft. “We ended up going through Egge to get most of the parts.” “Getting old parts for these engines is almost impossible, so the customer did the research for this one,” Mazzei says. With the machine work wrapped up, Mazzei turned his focus to the necessary new internal parts and assembly. The engine is a 406 ci sbc, standard World Products block, Ohio Crankshaft steel crank, six inch H beam steel rods, JE (13. He also tore down the heads to mill them and make sure everything checked out and resized the rods to make sure those were true. 030˝ and decked it, which made the 401 cid engine now 406 cid. Mazzei started his machine work on the 401 cid Nailhead by getting the crank turned. “The customer didn’t want to do too many performance upgrades, so we basically did a stock rebuild.” “When I took out the rings, they just fell apart,” he says. Luckily, the piston ring issue didn’t tear up the cylinders or cause any worse damage to other parts of the engine. We started tearing it apart and the big thing we found wrong with it was it had broken rings on the pistons, which is why it didn’t have any compression.” “It turned out the engine had been here in the shop before to have cylinder head work done. “The gentleman that brought in this Buick Nailhead has been a customer of mine in the past,” Mazzei says. The customer wanted Mazzei to give the engine a thorough tear down to make sure everything was in good, working order. Recently, Mazzei had an old customer come into the shop after purchasing a 1962 Buick Invicta complete with a 401 cid Buick Nailhead engine. Over the years, he’s built Hemis, big block Chevys, LS engines, Kawasakis and Triumph motorcycle engines, and he’ll even take on some restoration work. While Mazzei’s engine work ebbs and flows, he’ll tackle just about any type of build. I don’t do too many engines, but I’ll do several a year.” Our biggest focus is cylinder heads, especially the new, dual overhead cams and VVT stuff. Shaver offers EQ Vortec heads in assembled form. ![]() “I do stuff for Cleveland, Mentor and all around Ohio. As a point of interest, Shaver Racing Engines performed our flowbench testing and head assembly prior to our engines assembly at Speed-O-Motive. “I’m the machine shop for all the Federated Auto Parts stores in the area,” he says. Mazzei is just a one-man shop, but the old school machinist has the capabilities to do almost everything in-house with the exception of line honing and grinding crankshafts. It was H&W Auto Parts, then Pat Young’s, which was a Federated service, and today, the shop is owned by Fisher Federated Auto Parts. Over the years, the shop has been bought out three times. I’ve been running the machine shop ever since.” “However, around ’96, Tom decided to leave the store and the machine shop and they offered me the job. “Since I knew a lot about cars, I actually started helping Tom in the machine shop,” he says. Not long after that, the Coventry store began to go out of business, so Mazzei was given the opportunity to join Tom at the Barberton store. The Barberton machine shop got all brand new machines back in 1993. Tom was asked to run the machine shop at the Barberton location, while Mazzei stayed in Coventry. ![]() The gentleman Mazzei replaced was Tom Bowser. The shop had two locations – one in Coventry and one in Barberton, OH. “I later got a job up in Coventry, OH at a place called H&W Auto Parts, working as a salesman.” Why go to the trouble to build an engine just 1ci bigger? The answer was economics: the 428 was cheaper to make as there were fewer rejected castings and cheaper internal parts.“I got into the parts selling business in ’86,” Mazzei says. By tweaking the bore and stroke combination once again the 428 was born-it used a smaller bore and a longer stroke (4.135-inch bore/3.985-inch stroke). Undeniably the 427 FE was a hit, but Ford wasn't done with the design quite yet. It cut a swath through virtually every racing venue and in "side-oiler" configuration the performance of 427 Shelby Cobras was the stuff legends were made of (we should note we're leaving the 427 SOHC variant out of this conversation as they are a story in themselves). Of course one of the most famous of the FEs was the 427 (4.2328-inch bore/3.784-inch stroke). True to form Ford threw another FE in the mix with a similar displacement-the 410-inch FE used in Mercurys and Edsels had a smaller bore and a longer stroke (4.050-inch bore/3.980-inch stroke). Although still an FE, the 406 that came next was based on a redesigned block to accommodate the larger bore (4.130-inch bore/3.784-inch stroke). ![]()
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