On performance engines? Absolutely! Just remember this; the ONLY thing holding your engine together, ( the rod caps in place, the heads on the block and the crank in the main caps and so on) are the bolts. Use old, worn, rusted or cheapie bolts and they stretch or let-go. When bolts stretch, things get loose and start to move or “walk”. When things “walk“, failure is eminent! It’s pretty obvious what happens when bolts snap, so I don’t even need to go there. 

I can’t tell you how many “bargain priced” magazine ad engines we get in here (that need re-doing because they were cheapie engines to begin with) that have old, re-used bolts in them. A bolt might “look” OK, but what do you have, X-ray vision or something? Can you tell fatigue or excessive stretching by simply looking at a bolt? Hardly. The ONLY way to see if a bolt is strong or not is to test it in a Rockwell tester, and the ONLY way to test something in a Rockwell tester is to stress it until it breaks, and then say, “gee, that bolt was strong”, or “gee, that bolt sure was weak”. So testing a bolt isn’t exactly an option, so new, strong bolts are a must in any performance engine. ALL of our performance engines get new, super strong ARP bolts.