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. 

Mustang Sally Restoration: Block painted and Plastigauging the crank and bearing clearance

 Progress continues on the Sally 302 engine rebuild. The block has been painted black.

The brass freeze plugs are also installed.

Using a front and rear bearing only, Pops uses a dial indicator to check crank runout. It measured about 0.0002", amazing for 271,000 miles of wear and tear.

Here's the plastigauge strip laid down on the crank. 

The plastigauge kit comes with 2 sets of gauge material. The green material is in the range of 0.001" - 0.003" bearing clearance gap. The red set is from 0.002" to 0.006". Inspection results look like about .0035-.0037" range. The high-volume oil pump will fill that gap nicely.

Here's 2 inspections of a red strip. Looking like its between the 0.003" and 0.004" range. This is a really cool technique. It's very simple and manual process that provides very precise measurement information.

Here's an underside view of the 302 block for reference. I was asking dad how the crank gets supplied with oil. The crank journal webs have oil passage drilled into them. You can see the 2 holes in the middle and top side of the bearing journals.

Here's a close up view looking at the side. The one small hole in the crank journal area goes up to the cam bearing journal to provide oil to the cam bearings.