and it all comes apart

I took the short block apart.

I made several excuses for myself.

One excuse was that I have to clean the pistons properly after getting their sides smeared with white grease.

Another was that I wanted to get a second keyway cut into the crank and balancer. Something I had intended to do when I first had the short block built but forgot about it until after I got the engine back home.

The real reason though is that I have trust issues.

All logic says that by having my short block built by a reputable shop, all of the passages should be clear but after finding that the heads were not properly finished, I now had doubts.

The heads and block came from the same manufacturer. I don’t know if they both went through the same machine shop but this is guilt through association and instead of assuming, I had to check the blocks oil passages myself.

They were all good.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, with the heads having larger than standard combustion chambers, with just a change in cylinder head gaskets, I can drop the static compression down to about 9.25:1, low enough to add a little boost to this dinosaur. Hence the second keyway in the crank.

With a possibility of some sort of forced induction in the future, I thought I’d try something and open up the piston ring gap as well.

For a standard engine build, the gap should be based on a simple formula of: .004 X piston diameter. Rule of thumb says that an engine with forced induction, mild boost, should have a ring gap of .006 X piston diameter. Different manufacturers have different requirements. I’m using Diamond pistons and their specs for an engine with boost up to 15 lbs is supposed to be .0055 x piston diameter. My third excuse for taking the engine apart.

Besides taking a perfectly good short block apart, the only things I’ve managed to take care of is getting the crank to a machine shop called Revco to cut the keyway.

Stock keyway is 3/16”. The second keyway is 1/4”, I guess that’s the standard compliment when you add a keyway.

I should have been ready to reassemble the short block by the time the crank was ready but I felt the time would be better spent finishing a dance I started with the exhaust system, I kept getting my feet stepped on and decided to take a break.