Technical Cylinder wall thickness

How are you checking the wall thickness in your engine before boring........

 

Take out the frost plugs. So you can see the cylinder walls. Then keep trying until you find the largest diameter drill bit that will fit between the cylinder walls. Subtract that from the cylinder spacing, and you have the thickness available.

 

https://www.olympus-ims.com/en/applications/thickness-measurement-cast-engine-blocks-cylinder-bores/

 

Any shade tree method is just a guess, since wall thickness is never uniform around the entire cylinder.

A sonic test, or a big bucks x-ray is the only true methods with any real accuracy.
Anything you can do with a naked eye is just a very, very rough estimate to eliminate obviously poorly cast blocks with major core shift.

 

Ultrasonics.....compression wave only for wall thickness. Shear wave will show imperfections in the walls.

 

I bought one of these years (Dakota Ultrasonics) ago for porting cylinder heads. Not exactly cheap, but it saved me countless times from making the walls too thin.
Also let me know when a wall was "thicker"...than I thought..!
I bought one small radius probe for porting and a larger radius probe for cylinder measuring.
Very accurate, comes with a check tool for verifying accurateness before doing the actual measurement.
Can be adjusted for both ferrous and nonferrous materials (steels, iron, aluminums, magnesium, etc.)

https://dakotaultrasonics.com/product/racing/pr-82-sonic-tester/

Mike

 

Bumping an older thread.

I bought a Dakota Ultrasonics MX-2 on eBay. After speaking with the manufacturer - very helpful folks - I am realizing that the MX-2 really is the wrong tool for checking cylinder wall thickness, so I'll throw it back up on eBay.

The PR-82 and PR-9 are the models that Dakota makes for testing cylinder walls and such, but I'm not seeing any used ones, and the new ones are out of my price range.

Has anyone tried any of the less-expensive models of ultrasonic testers for this type of work?

Thanks

 

Bullet -

When you get a tester, be SURE...that you have a piece of the same material to be tested, with a "KNOWN" thickness to at least three digits to test/verify with, before you begin testing your actual parts in question.
Do this EVERY time that you do a thickness verification.
If the pretest is off...there's no sense in doing the actual verification !

Mike

 

I let my machine shop guy do it.

 

I build motors on a somewhat regular basis and periodically need to source a few different blocks to find one thick enough to take the overbore that I want (i.e., Ford FE). I'd get some use out of it if I had my own.