ELKHART -- Almost anyone can take apart and reassemble a Chevy 350 small block engine in less than an hour. Weston Brugh, Cody Chupp, Chris Lawson, Josh Wilson and Brad Hobson can do it correctly and without any parts left over.
Today, the five former Elkhart Area Career Center students will head to Las Vegas to compete in the Hot Rodders of Tomorrow Engine Challenge National Championship. The group will compete against three other teams from around the country to see who can dismantle and then restore a Chevrolet engine -- correctly -- the quickest.
The Elkhart crew went up against eight other schools for a championship spot during a May competition in Watervliet, Mich. Similar qualifiers were held throughout the country. The team came in second at Watervliet, but with the third-best time in the nation, they earned one of the four spots in the national competition.
All five graduated last summer-- Brugh from NorthWood, Chupp and Wilson from Northridge and Lawson and Hobson from Memorial. Wilson and Chupp are working locally at automotive shops, and Chupp also works at an area Harding's Market. Brugh works at an area Pizza Hut and at Grrreat Creations Inc. in Nappanee. Lawson works at an area Burger King and is looking for other employment.
Hobson works at an area Hacienda and is studying engineering at Southwestern Michigan College. Wilson and Brugh are also taking classes at ITT Tech and Ivy Tech Colleges respectively.
In addition to their school, work and personal lives, the group has spent ample time hovered over a Chevy engine block. Since the start of the year they've spent over 100 hours taking it apart and putting it back together.
On Thursday the team had their second-to-last practice before nationals in the career center's annex building. At 6:23 p.m. all five men, dressed in maroon work shirts and black pants, went to work like surgeons taking the engine apart.
There was a calm sense of urgency among Brugh, Chupp, Lawson and Wilson as they unscrewed bolts, hoses, pipes and tubes from the engine, which was hoisted about three and-a-half feet above the ground. Every few seconds one of the four would vocalize their progress to Hobson. He stood behind a table six feet away preparing tools for the team and making sure there was adequate space for the engine parts.
The engine was eventually stripped bare as the table in front of Hobson filled with dozens of parts that together could move a 1970s-era Chevy Camaro, Nova or Corvette.
The only chaos during the deconstruction came when bearings were dropped to the floor. The team will be penalized in competition for any parts or tools that are dropped. If anything hit the floor unexpectedly the team took a minute to yell and curse among themselves before quickly returning to work.
At 6:43 p.m. the engine had been fully dismantled. The team immediately set about putting everything back together, but then problems set in. After just a few minutes they discovered that the engine's pistons had been re-inserted in reverse order. They continued the assembly, but in competition they'll have to go back and fix such a mistake.
At 7:15 p.m. the engine had been put entirely back together, and the group was relatively happy with their progress. In spite of two penalties, which would have added an hour onto their final completion time, they thought it was a good run through. The team's final practice was Saturday morning.
The competition is sponsored by Specialty Equipment Market Association, a trade association that includes multiple facets of the auto industry. When they're not competing, team members will have a have access to the SEMA Show, which is closed to the public. They'll also be able to shadow workers from different automotive companies.
"Just us being able to go to that is a pretty big privilege," Chupp said.
Five days before leaving, the team said they weren't nervous about the competition. But they admitted that when the plane wheels touch down, they expect that the reality of the competition and the SEMA show will hit.
As Brugh summed it up, "We're going to Vegas."