I had to tighten bearing clearances up to under 1.5 thou, and changed the bore finish to better than 400 grit (Sunnen 600 stones) and finished with a plateau hone.
I believe, I was one of the first if not the first using plateau honing here. I gleaned some excellent info from one of the reps at one of the big machine tool manufacturers/resellers in the US that also supplied a lot of US race engine builders up to Nascar and they passed on some excellent info.
Turned out that their Oz importer had the hones on the shelf and didn't know what they were, or so they made out.
These changes eliminated the cavitation erosion I experienced using the 0W-5 oil and Vandervell bearings and ring and bore wear.
Rings were Sealed Power with very low tension oil rings. There was a lower tension oil ring but it was a special supplied only to Quicksilver and one or two other US builders.
We changed our bearings to a slightly tougher ACL bearing later. Note quite as soft in the overlay as the Vandervell, but more consistent and nicer finished.
My mate used the OE Ford chrome rings in his customer engines, but I preferred the Sealed Power rings. I didn't really like the ACl racing ring that most engine builders here used. Too soft (so bedded in very quickly) which created bore wear as the rings wore.
Both the Ford and Sealed Power rings worked fine.
I only started building my own stuff as I couldn't afford the pro builders anymore, they were delivering sub-standard engines unless you were a 'name' and as I was just starting out in cars without a rich Daddy I really did get 'seconds'
An engine I paid $4500 cash to be rebuilt had so much second hand [censored] in it it's a wonder it hadn't expired in my first season of racing. Flywheel bolts that were stretched over 1/3 their original length, three different sets of rings, a head with flogged out guides and valve heights all over the place, throttle shaft bores flogged, etc, etc.
It really looked like all the [censored] that had been sitting around the workshop was thrown on my engine and anything that was Ok on mine swapped.
This after I'd told the bloke do whatever needs doing to make it as good as possible......
I was lucky enough to be helped big time by an Australian Nascar and V8 Touring Car crew chief who showed me the basics of engine building in exchange for all my kart stuff for his young blokes.
He thought I had the makings of a racer, so fair trade I thought and I went from there till I got the dirts with it all a number of years later.
.....
