Senility, new glasses and a bit of luck

This is a bit embarrassing so I am going to put it down to senility and poor eyesight.

So, I got the block back from the engineers. They managed to get the broken bolt out, but had to Helicoil the threads. So far, so good.

I have never really been happy with the state of the deck; there was some rust pitting around the waterways, probably either where the engine had been stored with water remaining in the block or where it had been run for a prolonged period with no rust inhibitor in the water. Also, with back and forth to the engineers in the boot, I had managed to  put a healthy scratch in the top. So I decided ot get the deck skimmed before the final assembly.

6 thou off and it looked reasonable, not perfect but OK. So I ordered a load of new bits from Burton Power, new bolts gaskets, locking washers etc. and I was ready to go. I had to wait a whole week before I could get on with the rebuild, the last thing to do was to give the whole thing one final clean up.

I started on the bores, which had gathered a bit of dirt over the last few months. They all cleaned up beautifully, except No. 1 which had something dried onto it. I wiped at it with an oily rag, but it stayed on. I wiped it with carb cleaner and still it stayed on. Engine cleaner, nope. I scraped it with a finger nail and no luck. I tentatively poked it with a screwdriver ...hmmm.

I went and got my new reading glasses and peered at it. I shone my new, super-dooper, retina burning LED torch at it......and it turns out it was not a mark at all, but a bloody great gouge out the wall of the bore, about 5mm across, that I had completely mistaken for a bit of dirt. Worse still, there was another imperfection, a long scrape, parallel to the piston rings, about an inch down the bore, and deep enough to possibly catch the edge of the top ring.

I went in and had a cup of tea; when I came out and looked at it again it was still there.

So there we are. The block has been bored out to +90thou, which is as far as one can go. It has a dirty great gouge in the No. 1 bore, which I, being clearly senile and partially blind, had missed for the last 9 months and was now, probably useless.  In despair I headed for the drinks cupboard, grabbed a G and T and logged on to E bay to see how much a second hand Crossflow was going to be. And there, freshly listed, was a barely used, +90 thou over bored, 711M block, 35 minutes drive away.

That was definitely going to be MINE!

Saw it, bought it, cleaned it and am now in the middle of a dry build using all the new bits from my engine. I am not going to prejudice the outcome by even mentioning anything else about it till its finished and ready to install.

Except,

It might be black now.

My eye has developed a twitch.