Mustang Sally Restoration: Gapping rings and Machine Shop woopsie!

 Making good progress. Yesterday pops sent a few pics of his ring gap process.

I just love the freshly machined metal. Here is a ring being checked for gap. Here's the results he went for:

0.023" Top ring

0.025" Second ring

0.037 Oil rings (out of the box)

He says these gaps should be good for anything you throw at it, drag, road course, turbo or super charger or Nitrous.

Here pops uses his Dremel to grind the end of the rings to get the desired gap and then deburring and polishing with 320 grit sandpaper.

He says "It's tedious but if the gaps are too tight, then when they get up to temperature they can expand so much that the ends of the ring butt up against each other and can damage rings or break piston ring lands".

After gapping all the rings, they were bagged up in 8 sets and marked with the piston # so the combos stay together.

So, pops was installing, or attempting to install some piston/rod assemblies onto the crank today. Here he is plastigauging the bearing clearance for the rod bearing journals. He quickly found out that the wrong rods were assembled to the wrong pistons because when he put the first set together on the crank, they were not oriented right and were not able to move without making contact. :( So, he'll be calling Reynolds Machine tomorrow and find out what's going on.