I don’t think drilling and plugging would be a good choice. From the looks of the pictures you posted, the cam bearings are either fretting or rotating in the block on occasion. The oil may be saving you on that front.
If the oil drillings are .250”... At 100 psi of oil pressure, the exerted force on that square area is under 5 pounds of outward force. Not enough to open that crack in my opinion.

No rotation of the bearing noted this time they were installed with Loctite . where we are going to plug them off is down at the mains.. I think the idea of expansion through heat and and pressured lubrication is less than ideal at this point. This is the fix that is recommended to me by the machine shop that I use.. although the cracks are relatively small in nature multiplied times 3 it could end up being a fairly substantial oil leak causing issues other places in the motor I just assumed stop the oil from going there because it is no longer needed with the roller cam bearings

Probably pretty far out there..... but could this possibly be another effect from when you were beating stuff up in your E85 days?

Jay that's a valid question.. but I don't see how the two could correlate

For anyone who thinks Ritter is not aware of all of these issues with this generation of their stuff you would be sadly mistaken. They are fully well aware of the issues, and they are numerous.

As for the cracks we run a 60MM in a SB Chevy Dart Block that sees a fair amount of spring pressure and makes a bit of power and has no cracks at all around the cam tunnel. We just replaced that block this winter, BTW took 7 months and was well over $7K when done, just for those who think its only Mopar guys waiting for blocks. It did have some custom things done to it but nothing crazy, really just relocating the lifter bores so we could have better alignment with the heads we run and get away from the 1/2" wide cam bearings we had been using..

wondering how your Google search was going.. I couldn't find much information on the web where cracking race blocks was coming

I found several on Google.

I've seen many more with my own eyes.

We've been beating on a 436" SBC (somewhere north of 700 hp) built w/ a Dart Little M block for well over 10 years and never had any cracks. Never heard of any Dart iron blocks cracking like this.

Didn’t find much myself.... just some stuff concerning some old ford FE blocks.

Don’t recall ever hearing this concerning any Mopar block, stock or R3.

I understand the anything can be broke.. if this was a boosted application making 2000 horsepower I can understand some movement and potential cracking.. but there is obviously a design flaw with this area of the block. We are going to run it with the cracks.. maybe it will continue to get worse or maybe the block has done what it's going to do and is stable now. The only thing that I can hope for is if the block goes it doesn't take a whole bunch of quality pieces with it

There have been posts on Yellowbullet about Chevy aftermarket block issues but I didn’t have enough interest in them to read the posts. I do know from my friends that LS engines eat cam bearings rather quickly.

LS engines have issues with the oil pump design that leads to their issues for the most part. Its just the way they drive the pump that becomes an issues with them especially the NA stuff that sees 8500+ rpm regularly where it really starts to show.

I need to ask the painful question here, does anybody else with an iron Ritter block have the same problem as Whitedart? Is anybody else even close on the power output that Whitedart is putting out?

How many Ritter builds are out there?

Mine is months away from being finished and probably close to 9 months before the whole package done (Car).

We just dynode the Vettes SBC, it made ok power

Sorry to hear this.
Wish you could of had a G3 platform to test.
I know it's not in the cards.
Hope you get every bit of life out of that block.
Matt

Lawndart has one. Haven't seen any of his post lately. I had one like Shiloh's. It was a total piece of crap. I was lucky & got my money back.

There's a new Ritter iron block that's been at the ICH Swap for sale for a couple years at least. I asked one of the local Mopar small block guys about buying it. He said to run away because it has "issues". He did not elaborate.

I'm hoping to make good power out of my deal, I guess time will tell.
If mine makes good power and has no issues then what?

I know Dart said they would make a block but that is a couple years away at least.

I'm telling you guys my block is different than Whitedart's but nobody is listening

Whitedart's block was an earlier version and the people that machined it are no longer doing the work for Ritter. Ritter moved all his stuff to a new facility with way better machines. I got blocks #3 and #4, who got #1, #2, #5, #6 and #7?

Nobody on this board I guess

Anyways Whitedart's block has problems and I wish him the best, he has one of the best machine shops in the US working on his stuff so he is in good hands.

These type of build are rare and even more rare because they are Mopars.

Like I said stay tuned.

That don't count Al

Believe Brian (IMM Engines) block was one of the newer pieces. He was going to use it for a new ebrock head build, but sold it and is venturing into a Gen3 build. It had already gone through QMP’s hands and as far as I’ve know had been given a thumbs up.