20 ENGINEBUILDERmag.com | AUGUST 2020
Engine of the MonthAuto Machine Inc.
Auto Machine Inc. is probably a familiar name to long-time readers of
Engine Builder. The St. Charles, IL-based Auto Machine Inc. was the 2017
Vintage Engine Builder of the Year and its owner, John DeBates, has been a
regular speaker at industry events and a contributor to our magazine over
the years.
John, along with his brother Jim DeBates, established Auto Machine
Inc. in August 1974. This was an easy decision for the brothers to start an
automotive business as their family had been in the industry since 1902
in St. Charles, IL. Starting out as drag racers in the early ‘70s, the DeBates
brothers decided the only way to get good machine work done was to do it
themselves.
Auto Machine first focused its attention around cylinder head work
because it was easily available. Starting with only a valve grinder, seat
and guide machine, hot tank and surface grinder, the business quicklyexpanded into a full machine shop with crankshaft grinding, crankshaft
welding, line boring, and rod reconditioning.
Today, you can get your engine completely rebuilt from A to Z at Auto
Machine Inc., which does a wide variety of engines – everything from
antique motors to stock rebuilds to all-out performance.
“We’ve changed our business over time,” John Debates says. “Do we
want to be a production-style engine rebuilder or do we want to do custom
work and go into niche areas? In the late-‘80s we got our first ‘real’ vintage
project – a 1924 Studebaker, a referral from another customer – and we
got into antique engine building and really liked that. We’ve done a lot of
weird stuff.”
DeBates is quick to point out that “weird” is good – at least in his mind –
and vintage work makes up about 25 percent of the business.
“We do a lot of stuff from the ‘40s and ‘50s, which to me doesn’t seem
that old because I was born back then,” DeBates says. “We also work
on lesser-known domestic vehicles from the early days and a lot of old
European stuff from the ‘20s and ‘30s.”
A perfect example of the shop’s affinity for vintage engine work is a re-
cent rebuild of a 1929 Duesenberg engine – a straight eight, dual overhead
cam, four valves per cylinder engine.
“That was kind of interesting because I had always wanted to take
a Duesenberg apart,” DeBates says. “This gave that opportunity. The
customer came to us from a body shop in Rockford, IL that we’ve done work
for now for the last four or five years. They do high-end restoration work.
The place has got Duesenbergs, old Packards, Pierce Arrows and stuff like
that in it all the time.”
The customer was referred to Auto Machine for two reasons – his ‘29
Duesenberg engine needed an oil hole re-sleeved and the block had a stud
that needed attention, primarily. The shop ended up doing a few other fixes,
but those were the main reasons the engine needed help.
“The engine had an oil passage that ran through the water jacket and it
corroded through,” he says. “We had to disassemble the engine and bore
that passage out and sleeve it. We put in a 10 ̋-long brass sleeve down in
the hole to repair it.
“When I was repairing this oil hole, there was like three other holes
that intersected it. After I put the sleeve in there with some Loctite, I had to
go in and drill the sleeve to make sure that the oil was going to flow to the
right places. I was a little worried I might miss one, but the owner had a
complete diagram of the oiling system and the whole engine. The sleeve was
a 1/2 ̋ OD for the oil hole. The sleeve material was a piece of thin-wall brass
tubing from McMaster-Carr.”
The next step was to fix the block’s deck surface and the stud that was
misaligned, along with a few other small fixes to get the engine back to
normal.
“It terms of the work, we just did some basic stuff,” he says. “I
polished the crank a little bit before I put it back in. We had to detail a couple1929 Duesenberg Straight 8
John DeBates | St. Charles, IL
20 ENGINEBUILDERmag.com | AUGUST 2020
20-22 eb.aug20 EOTW.indd 20 8/7/20 8:33 AM
Naresh Jariwala