Pics are below. I wish I'd taken some of the block early on before machine work and before the repairs.

I paid $500 for this block; it was a Busch circle track motor and had broken a rod. It came complete with this custom 1 cylinder cam. What a beauty, eh?

This is an early on-center block; it still has a wet sump oil pickup (relocated up near #1 cap) although the clearancing for the big stroke crank almost takes it away. You can see the 4 bolt splayed middle caps; this is not a cross-bolted block.

It had a couple of dinged spots, one on each side, where the rods had hit before exiting through the pan and ruining some poor racer's day. The front two bores were also nicked and gouged from the same catastrophe. On the plus side, there were no blown up cylinders into the water jackets, the mains looked decent, and it was cheap. Did I mention it was cheap?

On to the repair work: the spots on the lower block sides were v'ed out with a die grinder, the ends of the cracks were drilled to stop them from propagating, and they were arc welded with a high nickel "Nyrod". We preheated the block in a block oven to about 400 degrees, and then carried it to the welding shop with a steel rod through the cam bores, sweating hugely. It came out very nicely, thanks to Pete, one of the welding instructors at FCCJ. The second picture above shows the weld on one side.

Next, we sleeved the front two cylinders. Interesting trivia: I had to bore them .187" oversize for the sleeves; I didn't hit the water jacket on either cylinder. Now that's a thick wall! I left a step at the bottom of each bore to locate the sleeve. The sleeves were frozen, the block was preheated slightly again, and after coating the sleeves with loctite, they were pressed in. You can't really see the sleeve in the pictures above; they basically blend in with the deck once the deck has been surfaced.

The main caps had to be align bored and honed next. I made an ugly discovery; the thrust cap had insufficient crush in the block's registers to locate it properly. Oh well, just one more thing to fix. Mark Hedrick had it welded and did a beautiful job of fitting it and the other caps as well as finishing the align bore and hone. We ended up with all main bearing clearances set to .0022-.0023". The finish on the mains is visible in the third picture above.

Tooling opportunity...what fun! We needed mandrels to deck the block. The block is located for surfacing with a bar through the mains; the block goes through a mandrel in each end main bearing bore (basically a metal donut). After 3 tries on the lathe, I had a pair that Mark thought were barely acceptable. I decked the block at Horsepower by Hedrick using BHJ tooling to measure and equalize the deck heights. One side was twisted .012" and the other .006"; I ended up with them equalized at 9.501".

Almost done with the block. (whew!) The final hone was done, mostly by Mark, to fit the bores to the BRC pistons. BRC specified .006" clearance but due to the heavy thermal load on this motor, we went with .007" clearance. We measured all of the pistons; 5 were dead on and one was .001" small. That piston was marked for #1 bore and that bore honed to match. The final honed cylinders are seen above.