How many people actually get this done? Is it required for every build?

 

It would be foolish not to balance the engine while you are having it built. If you are having machine work done it should be 'blueprinted' anyway. Of course, 'blueprinting' seems to mean a lot of different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

 

I honestly dont know thats why I was asking the general question in the first place...

 

Blueprinting (to me) is having everything measured and set to a precise specs.By everything, i mean EVERYTHING inside the engine. Wristpins, rods,bearings,cylinders, measuring all your journals, taper,runout, out of round, on everything and recording it.VERY labor intensive. Several hours by a machinist.
That sums up a "fully blueprinted" engine to me.

 

In general, blueprinting means making sure everything has been machined accurately. For example, the crankshaft main bearing centerline should be perfectly parallel to the deck of the block. During manufacturing it is possible for metal chips to get under the block and cause the deck to be several thousandths of an inch higher on one end than on the other. This will cause the compression ratio to vary from cylinder to cylinder which means that power output will be different in each cylinder. Modern machining operations at the factory are much better than they used to be so this isn't as much as a problem as it used to be. On old American V8's it wasn't unusual for one end of the block to be .010" -.015" higher than the other end due to sloppy machining. If you have your block decked, the machinist (if he is any decent) should automatically reference the deck surface off the crankshaft centerline so this shouldn't be a problem. But there are many 'machinists' out there who don't know what they are doing and will just go ahead and machine the deck in the exact same plane that the original surface was in without checking for its position relative to the crankshaft centerline.

Of course, this is not the only dimension that is important. The cylinders need to be bored and honed exactly 90 degrees to the centerline of the crankshaft and the cam bearing centerlines need to be parallel to the crankshaft main bearing centerline, among other things.

There are no published 'blueprints' from the manufacturers so this term can be a bit confusing. The term does not mean that the block is the exact dimensions that the original designer specified. If that were the case any engine with oversized pistons would be 'un-blueprintable'.

 

I would agree with this. A specification worksheet should always come with an engine that has been blueprinted. If you ask the builder/machinist for one and he doesn't have records I would question his abilities.