Brent,
To clarify Scat quality varies and seems to have much more issues than in the past so in my eyes it very much is the case. For a time I worked at a shop that was a Scat dealer (RAM in Clinton Ohio) and another friend is the head machinist at the local VW shop(LA products in Akron) which is also a Scat dealer so I still see issues here and there. Most of the time he points them out as I rib him for using Empi knock off parts he says he has found to have less (obvious) issues. Nothing is perfect but for my money I have long learned to buy the best I can afford at the time. Generally Scat is my go to and I won't even consider anything below them but I have gotten bad parts. Summit is also right up the road and I'm probably there once a week at least where it's not uncommon at all to find a blem crank or set of rods on the discount table.
My billet 3.4 SBF Scat crank came in the old shop with an undrilled/unfinished flange and the wrong size key way in the wrong spot. More recently my purchase of a forged 4.25 FE Scat crank I was assured was the best off the shelf crank available resulted in a flaking slag covered piece neither Scat nor the vendor who couldn't be reached saw fit to address which had it to be shotpeened and rebalanced. The 4.25 cast crank another FE guy here got in his "kit" is riddled with porosity. In that I'm referring to every unmachined area has 3/16" air pockets that hopefully are limited to just the surface. You certainly don't see display pieces that look like that and in my case it is more than enough to look to other suppliers when possible. So yes any part can be flawed at any cost/level but with this in mind I'm not interested in buying another Scat FE crank or rods no matter how much power they can handle etc. I'm looking for nicer parts for this.
Scott,
I asked a simple question about availability of a nice US made set of rods. I'm not interested in dragging this into global economy politics. No matter how nice Molnar rods are in your opinion I don't want to spend my money on them. I have an old American car with an old American engine if for no other reason I consider it a touch cooler not to use China stuff to build it with.
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I guess my experiences have been quite the opposite. Eagles are absolutely a no-go for me. Won't use their stuff. RPM's parts need some machine work out of the box to be usable, but all-in-all, they are good parts that I have seen zero failures with. I've had issues with practically every manufacturer out there, and as a mechanical engineer who specialized in mechanical design and manufacturing, I understand that there's a bell curve with every part and sometimes we get a part that's on the extreme end. As that sample size goes up, the chances of a ringer will go up.
With all of that being said, I don't have thousands of engines under my belt like a high-quantity "rebuilder", but I've built a LOT of engines and have sold a tremendous amount of parts over the years. I have chosen Scat to be my "go-to" for my street and street/strip engines and to this day, I can think of exactly 2 items that were out of the scope of "this needs a little correction". I'm not talking about having to dust the inside of a bearing housing or a pin bore, because if we had to eliminate manufacturers according to those standards, we would be sitting here without any parts to work with. IMO, that's part of custom engine building. Those 2 items consisted of: 1. one single rod that when I removed the cap, it wouldn't go back on and I don't see how the guy putting it together even got it on. 2. A 4.250" SBF 4340 crank rod journal that had about .0006" of taper in it. That crank was in a late batch of 3 cranks that I received two weeks ago, so I will keep my eye on them. Can't say that I have seen even a single case of porosity on their cast cranks or any flaking.
I am saying all of this not to be argumentative, but just to state my own retort, as I didn't want anyone thinking that Scat has stooped to the quality level of some of the others.
Getting back to your original question, it looks like Crower is the only option for you, unless you wanted to have one of the other manufacturers make a custom rod, and then you're gonna be over the cost of the Crower.
Good luck and let us know what you come up with.