OK, technically the cylinder heads didn't come "back" from the machine shop, because they're not the ones we took over there. Once the guy who runs the shop (let's call him Bernie, on account of that's his name) got our old ones apart, he found that the valve guides were worn out of tolerance and would have to be replaced, and that they're just a year or two too old to have the hardened valve seats modern fuels require.

Unfortunately, they're also a revision in which the existing seats aren't inserts, they're part of the casting, which makes retrofitting them with the hardened ones a real pain in the butt. All told, we were looking at about $1,200 to get them rebuilt--and in the process of machining the castings to take the new valve seats, there's a real chance of accidentally cutting into the cooling jacket, at which point you have just made a boat anchor.

So, Dad did a deal with Bernie for this other set of heads, which he built for someone a couple years ago and then ended up going with something else. They're a slightly newer casting and are fitted out with hardened seats, new guides and valves, and slightly stiffer valve springs than stock. They weren't cheap, but they were also not 1,200 bucks with 16 chances for failure.* We traded him the old heads as part exchange. He can stick them on a shelf (he has many shelves full of SBC cylinder heads, I've seen them) and someday down the road, when someone wants to build an engine they're suitable for, there they'll be.

The crankshaft and connecting rods we sent over have been cleaned up, checked over, and polished. This fills in one of the last pieces of information we needed to start the build, namely by how much those bearing journals had to be ground. Turns out the mains are now .0020 under, and the connecting rod journals are .0010 under. With that in hand, we can order the right size bearings, and once those arrive, I can start to actually build the dang engine.

Everything's on order now, and should be arriving Thursday or Friday. We have therefore scheduled the first of the actual build sessions for Friday afternoon. So that's exciting...

--G.

* I'm not trying to knock Bernie's skill here, the man clearly knows what he's doing. But it's a delicate operation you have to repeat 16 times in a row, and, you know, shit happens.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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