For strickly performance reasons: has anyone ever heard or removing the top balancer shaft and pluggin the oil holes? Im using a 93 3.8 supercharged motor in a sandrail and dont really car about a smooth engine.
Thanks in advance.

i dont know of anyone here doing it, but there used to ba alot of talk about balance shaft removal on series II motors on www.3800pro.com

Give it a whirl. It'* not going to gain you a noticeable amount. My personal opinion would be that it'* not worth the trouble for the gain. But if you are looking for every scrap of power, more power to you.

Have you torn the engine down yet?

My "stubborn mechanic advice" is to not remove the balance shaft, on any engine. Now I certainly don't know as much about the Series 1 3800 as some people here.

The balance shaft on any engine is not there for the customer (driver). People have this false impression that it'* there to make the engine feel smoother and reduce vibration inside the car. While it does do some of this, that blance shaft is really there to cancel out the small vibrations; the ones we can't even feel; that could eventually let the engine litterally shake itself appart. It'* there to protect the engine above all else. Like I said, I've never removed the balance shaft from a 3800, but I think back to an exersize back in trade school where we removed balance shafts from several import motors and not one of them ran for longer than 2 hours on the dyno before they died.

This was (maybe still is) a popular item to remove from the 2.5 Turbo Mopar engines from 89-92. Never knew if the engines blew from the balance shafts or just because the engines were THAT poor.
I know those engines didn't come with knock sensors, so I am sure that removing them was detrimental.
We have knock sensors on the 3800, so if we remove them I suspect the knock sensor will pick up noise caused from their removal, thus you would have more KR. Not a very worthy investment of time and gaskets.
But then how do we set new limits without testing the old ones?

OlBlue, the 2.2/2.5 Turbos had knock sensors (others didn't), and only the 2.5 had the balance shafts (all configurations). Yes, it is a real popular mod with this engine (as is doing it to the mitsubishi 2.6) and it does gain a few hp, but as Bill pointed out, the gain isn't worth the cost of removing the assembly.

As was said, the balance shaft is not there for driver comfort. The balance shaft is there to reduce engine vibrations to save your engine from vibrating itself a part. Yeah it doesn't make a huge difference in vibrations, but it helps. Removing it would gain you a little power, but not a whole lot. Personally, this is the only reason why I am still running a stock style timing chain with my setup is because I want to keep my balance shaft. A double roller doesn't allow me to do this. :(

My guess is that removing the balance shaft would have the same basic effect as replacing the harmonic damper with a light weight pulley.

This can lead to bearing failure. Here is a good tech article about harmonic dampers.

http://www.atiperformanceproducts.co...mper_dinan.htm

The only reason to remove the balance shaft is if you are installing a double roller timing set that necessitates the removal of the gear that drives the balance shaft. I disconnected mine once and had a noticable vibration at 1500 rpm.