Blue Print Engines - Mr. Norris Marshall

C10 Talk

Truck Talk Media

Leisure, History, Automotive

5 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2024

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since Norris was young, car culture and automobiles have been a central part of his life.
Growing up, his father was the stereotypical 50’s hotrodder with the nostalgic flattop
haircut and a 1929 Model A roadster that he built. Later, his Dad would go on to drag
race a front-engine “slingshot” and eventually do some circle track racing.

Norris grew up hearing those stories and that was the spark that turned him into a car
guy. By the time Norris was a senior in high school, he was bracket racing at multiple
tracks in the Midwest and later did some stock car racing.

Norris started his business in 1982 in a 4-car garage in a residential part of town. Back
then he was doing machine shop work, boring blocks, valve jobs, etc… his customers
were racers, street rodders, and shops. The business grew into doing complete
engines, and eventually, it turned into a factory where they re-manufactured engines.
That business eventually topped out at 100 engines a day.

Today BluePrint Engines is the authority in crate engines and has produced over
400,000 crate engines. BluePrint Engines operates out of a 210,000 sq foot state-of-
the-art facility in Kearney, Nebraska.

Norris has served on the SEMA Board of Directors since 2022.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Truck Talk Media.
0:02.1	C-10 Talk episode 295.
0:05.5	We got Norris Marshall.
0:07.3	How about Blueprint Engines?
0:09.4	Businessman, father, grandfather, husband.
0:13.1	True Story, Americana.
0:14.9	This is what it's all about right here.
0:17.3	Blueprint Engines, Norris Marshall, coming at you.
0:19.6	We wanted to build a better product and have more control over the supply chain for the crank and the heads and the rods.
0:27.2	So we started hiring designers, design engineers, and we started hiring consultants who were specialists in camshafts a specialist in cylinder heads or whatever.
0:38.3	And we literally just slowly, one piece at a time, designed every part for every engine that we make.
0:45.3	With engine blocks and heads, we design those, we maintain control over the design.
0:51.3	We're not a foundry, right? So we can do machining, but we don't pour
0:56.4	molten metal. So we work with foundries globally. And like our engine blocks come from a
1:03.6	foundry in Germany. The German foundry is an OEM foundry. They make blocks for Ford and GM and
1:09.2	Volkswagen and lots of other people and
1:10.9	super high quality stuff. We bring in raw castings by the container load and we do the
1:16.1	machining here and that's really nice because, you know, from the time we put a rock casting into a
1:22.4	machine until that engine's running on the dino could be a week. Damn, son.
1:30.0	Hey guys, let me tell you about LMC truck.
1:33.0	Keeping generations on the road.
1:34.2	Think about that.
	...

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