Somewhere, at a tender age, I read a paean to the Chevy Straight Six engine block. One of the most heavily modified engines of all time. Later on when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance it had a similar vibe and effect.
I still sometimes use it as an allegory. As it originally shipped it had very low power density. It’s an unremarkable engine. But what it has in spades is potential. You can modify it to increase cylinder diameter, you can strap a giant header on it to improve volume and compression more. You can hang blowers and custom manifolds and more carbs off it to suck out more power. IIRC at the end of its reign they had people coaxing 3, almost 4 times the first gen OEM horsepower out of these things. They had turned it into a beast for that generation of “makers”.
I still sometimes use it as an allegory. As it originally shipped it had very low power density. It’s an unremarkable engine. But what it has in spades is potential. You can modify it to increase cylinder diameter, you can strap a giant header on it to improve volume and compression more. You can hang blowers and custom manifolds and more carbs off it to suck out more power. IIRC at the end of its reign they had people coaxing 3, almost 4 times the first gen OEM horsepower out of these things. They had turned it into a beast for that generation of “makers”.