What have you read?

As far as I am concerned they are probably the best of the budget rods... Especially the power adder ones.

 

What have you read?

As far as I am concerned they are probably the best of the budget rods... Especially the power adder ones.

Some of the older threads had decent feedback but some of the more recent threads have issues with breaking. I know they are China forgings that are machined here in Michigan. Not sure if was a bad batch of material which can happen just hate to build a new motor and have a rod break. The Molnar power adder rods are $726 only other option in that budget is the Callies Compstar or step op to an Oliver at $1300. My combo is only 700hp NA plus a single stage fogger at 300 so am at the top limit for the budget rods.

 

I use a lot of Molnar and K1 rods both. Love them.

 

Dont know how recent we are talking but I have a BBC set in my 500 cid stroker BB Mopar. 200+ passes the last 2 years making 820+ hp NA. We did have some issues with pin bushings in them that I never had before but I think that was other issues.

 

I have run the Power Adder rods in a 1,000 hp + 509" BBC on E85 with very good success. It's a street deal, and not max effort, but I believe they are a great "bang for the buck" rod. As a matter of fact, I have a set of Power Adder Plus BBC rods on the way for a 540" Roots build that I would expect to be in the 1,200-1,300 hp range.

 

Shafiroff uses them for years now in many of there BBC.

 

I believe that Molnar rods are the best budget (China forging) rods that you can buy. They seem to be very strong and you see more and more 1500+hp guys using them.
It seems that Molnar has been extremely popular for a few years now, and with more products sold, will come more failures. Kinda reminds me when Callies came out with CompStar, it was the Go-To rods and crank over Eagle and Scat and after selling a bunch over a few years, failure rate started to show up as much as Eagle and Scat. Unfortunately, the same will happen with Molnar.
Is it because the quality is going down? I very much doubt that. I think it is just a numbers game.
You have to remember that 90-95% of connecting rod breakage is blamed on the rod itself, when in reality, it is closer to 10% (if that), that is a failure caused by the rod itself and nothing else causing it to fail (wrong rod for the application, wrongfully installed, bearing clearance issues and bearing failures, oiling issues, detonation, etc..).
If you are shopping for budget rods (less than $1,000us), it is hard to not go with Molar Power Adder rods. I think they are the best rod for that price point. If you want to go better, you will have to go to a Callies Ultra, Oliver Billet, Crower billet, Dyers, etc... and those will run you roughly $1,300us+ (sky is the limit) while the Molnar is pretty much half price ($700us ish).
Which direction you want to go is up to you: Less than $1,000, I think Molnar is the ONLY choice, above $1,000us, then that is a whole new discussion! And then there is the steel vs aluminum discussion, lol!

 

Thanks for replies so far...The Molnar crank I have looks great and all the clearances were perfect. I called Molnar and talked to the other gentleman who works there. Never read about any BBC rods breaking just SBC and LS in last few months so thought may been a bad forging batch.

 

Probably tune up related.

 

Agree with Lekid, as more use them, more will push the envelope. There will be failures, I am sure.

 

Another added bonus is that they are very light. Makes a lot of combos easier to balance.

 

Can anyone document any known Molnar issues specifically? Where did this rumor come from? Not fair to the manufacturer if not backed up.

 

I bought their product and really like the crank, clearance are spot on. Was set on getting their PA rods. I did a search on here, read a few Molnar posts and saw some LS sites with few posts. Posted this to get some fresh feedback since I will be buying fairly soon...so far it’s good.

 

I have the 6.700" Molnar power adder plus rods.

 

I saw one guy claiming they fail all the time on FB the other day. Other than that I've never read anything negative about his parts.

 

I seen that as well and first thought was if one guy has seen that many issues then the circle of people he is dealing with/speaking about needs to be assessed. More likely to find a common builder and/or tuner issue than the rods themselves.


We have run a 598 BBC well into the 4's on spray with the standard 6.700 power adder rods. Hand in hand with some Eagle 3D's, the Molnars are a better looking rod with more material in what I would consider the right area.

 

Run them in 1000-1200+whp turbo LS stuff all the time.

 

I sell a fair amount of Molnar rods and have yet to have anyone complain, never mind break them.

Parts almost never fail....without some sort of supporting idiocy. Tune-up, errors in assembly, parts grossly mismatch for the application. Stuff like that.