[njsteve]

I got the engine fully apart today. Almost got a hernia too, breaking loose those $%#@*& head bolts with my old trusty diesel mechanic 3/4" drive ratchet and a pipe on the end of it.

The rod bearings looked decent but you can see the small copper wear pattern on the tops of each rod bearing - most likely from my Dad running the 10-1/5 to 1 compression engine on 87 octane for the random times he was driving it over the past couple decades. OUCH! All the mains were at the copper layer top and bottom. The crank itself looked very nice. I guess the original Ford Clevite bearings did their job and sacrificed themselves instead of the crank journals.

I Plastigaged a couple bearings and the rods looked to be really tight: much tighter than the minimum 001. line on the paper. The mains came in at .002.

I had to borrow a ridge reamer from the local autoparts store to get the minor ridge out of the tops of the cylinders so as not to damage anything coming out.

The lifters has a varnish buildup and were sticking in their bores at the top of their travel so I just left them there and turned the block over and then pulled the camshaft out while the lifters hung upside-down. I then pushed them back down their bores and they slid out nicely from underneath without scratching the lifter bores at all. The original camshaft looked decent but there was varnish on the surface in spots. All the bottoms of the lifters were evenly worn with a hint of concave wear.

The combustion chambers on the heads looked very nice, as did the pistons. Not much carbon buildup at all.