Ray Gibbons(e) queried:
> Rolf is in fact some kind of alternative medicine procedure. Aligns your
> sprockets, or something.
I thought "rolf" was synonymous with "buick."
> Which brings to mind a car question. If you have the main bearing caps
> line bored (should that be "align bored"?)
No, that's when you're hanging around the alignment shop waiting for your
car to be done.
> as Denise suggests, does that
> enlarge the bearing holes? What do you do then? Are bearings made for
> oversize caps?
Line boring a block is the same process as sizing rods. The flat mating
surfaces of both the rod/block and the rod/main caps are surfaced, making
the hole elliptical instead of round. Then the caps are installed and
torqued to spec and the hole is bored out to the original size. For a
block, all of the holes are bored at once in a straight line.
Sizing rods is not that uncommon a thing to do. Once I was reassembling
a B engine, and after I torqued down the third rod cap, the crank could
no longer be turned by hand. Sizing the rods fixed the problem. Blocks
should never need to be line bored, but in a case where there's no way to
determine if the holes are round and concentric, it's a good idea. It
shouldn't cost any more than boring cylinders. If there were a problem
and the block wasn't line bored, YMMV, AFAIK.
BTW, this is the trick for getting off the end main caps: There's some
godawful big bolt that holds together some part of a B's suspension. I
don't know exactly where it comes from, but it would be hard to miss
because it's got a 2" wide square washer on it. Mine was given to me.
Anyway, the threads on this bolt are the same as the threads on the back
of the main cap that's so hard to get off. So get one of these bolts and
screw it into the main cap and bash on the underside of the big square
washer with a BFH. Repeat on either side of the cap, PRN. Eventually,
the thing will come off.
Denise Thorpe
thorpe@kegs.saic.com
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