[chopper]

Talking with George Anderson is an excellent idea. You might also wish to talk with Bill Parham at Southern Automotive. He has built several of the Shelby block aluminum engines, and from what I understand, did some of the initial testing for Shelby when the blocks first came out. Bill is also an owner and Superformance dealer, and he has numerous engines taking part in the annual meets. He has some info on some of the early failures with the Shelby blocks, which I understand had to do with insufficient strength of the lower webbing areas.

I agree completely with Turk about it being far more important to have a reputable, knowledgeable shop build the engine, rather than a local shop. Having made the mistake of having a local "expert" rebuild my own engine, only to have it suffer a massive lower end failure 1100 miles later, finally confirmed to even my hard head that it's better to get the experts and deal with the long distance than to try to have unqualified people screw up an expensive piece of hardware. If you are fortunate enough to live by a knowledgeable builder, more power to you, but do your homework very carefully and talk to some of his customers to see if they are satisfied. Given that you are talking about a $20k+ investment, you want to be sure the builder can really do what he brags about. My local mechanic and I didn't do that three years ago and the lawsuits just recently got settled.