I've used a knife sharpener to clean up blocks and heads. Like so (but with 2 hands) At school we used a cylinder hone to make some 20thou bearings fit a standard crank. Just put the bearings in the rod, rod in a vice, and honed until the clearances were right. It worked. What dodgy stuff have you done?
In the late 70's my father took the rods-pistons-bearings out of a six cylinder with a cracked block---pulled the pan--head off of my truck--pulled the rods/pistons out---shoved the used- rods- pistons-rings- bearings--had me buy a gasket-set--bolted the S.O.B.--back together--poured the old oil and anti-freeze back in --AND I DROVE THE CRAP OUT OF IT FOR 5 MORE YEARS----I did change the oil !!!!!
Back when parts stores and most 'yards were closed by 5 on Sat and didn't reopen until Mon AM I had a duff starter, grounded field. Stationmate said "I want to try something". We took the starter apart, unwound the field and removed the insulation, rewound it with a layer of friction tape between the windings, wound up about 1 1/2 turns short to get it to fit, gently tapped it to match curve of the housing, put it all back together and reinstalled the starter. Got me underway for liberty that weekend, mission accomplished. Was still starting the car 1 1/2 years later when I smacked it up. Ed
Hey Man, We're HAMB'ers... We make shit work that other people call junk. Dodgy machine work is in our nature Not exactly a "machine work" story, but a good one. Had a Toyota Van/Waggon... Probably the ugliest vehicle ever built, but it ran sooo damn good. One day it threw a rod thru the side of the block. Was gonna junk it, but just for shits and giggles I pulled the pan to inspect the damage. Long story short, I pulled the busted piston and broken rod out, patched the hole in the block with a soup can and some JB-weld, removed the rockers and unpluged the injector from the bad hole, and the damn thing ran!!!! At first it was a joke to drive it, but it just kept on running, so I kept on driving it. Vibrated like hell, but it actually ran good. About 6 months later, my parents were in a car wreck 400 miles from home. I hooked the 2 wheel car dolly to the back of the toyota and headed to middle Georgia to do a rescue run. Not sure what the plan was, figured we could tow it to a relatives house about 50 miles away, or rent a u-haul truck or something to get my folks Lincoln Towncar home. We ended up towing that Lincoln all the way back to Louisville in a 3 cylinder minivan with a block held together by a soup can and JB-weld. Going over Mont Eagle was a 20 MPH affair that took about an hour... But it made it! Shortly after that, the alternator went out, and I junked it.
When my grandfather was young he was hopping up a T with his older brother. To get a higher compression head they tried taking a stock head out to where they had just paved a section of the road and with one driving the other stood on the head like a skateboard to try to "machine" it for higher compression. It worked to take metal off the head but they couldn't get it off even (too much weight on the back of the head).
Some emery cloth stuck into a slotted bolt makes a great hone. Honed both brake cyclinders and engines with one. As a kid we used the curb for all of our metal removal needs. Sharpened lots of popsicle sticks into knives too.
slightly O/T but on topic as far as technique; i used to manage a service dept for a small engine dealer, lots of lawn care folks in and out. every once in a while, get some OLD pos single cylinder engine in that the owner is trying to get just one more season out of... and here's one of those. the customer was elderly and the machine was elderly; the head gasket had failed and the head had a burned out spot where that happened. if we'd have had a core i'd have had the guys put a replacement head on it, but we didn't. i set a sheet of emery paper on my counter, soaked it with WD-40, and while i answered phones, wrote up tickets, whatever, i had that head swirling around on the emery paper. it took about four hours of gentle swirling to get the sealing surface flat and the gouge gone. spotted the owner a head gasket and my "labor" and he went home a happy man. i think the mower outlived him by a couple years.
I picked up an O/T 85 Chevy truck with a first year 4.3L V6 in it. The guy said it had a valve tick which turned out to be a rod knock when I went to pick the truck up, but I said screw it and took it home anyway. It didn't sound all that bad, so I pulled the oil pan and found one of the rod bearings had just started to spin. The crank was still mostly smooth, but you could tell it wore some material away. I got a micrometer and measured the journal, turns out it was just a hair over 10 thou, so I got some emery cloth and sanded away at the crank from underneath the truck, got it so it was in spec and smooth all the way around, threw in a 10 under bearing, and fired her up. I drove that poor thing for about a year, sold it, and still see it running around every now and then.
Awesome stuff guys. A few more. Not really machining but a friend of mine has a 3HP Lister, big old hit and miss diesel. It has a big bit of plate brazed to the block, he stripped it down, brazed together rod, nice big hole in the cylinder. The bloody thing runs great, he uses it to pump water on his property, always starts right up and runs nice. I heard of a story, some guys were on their way up to a classic car rally in a 4 cylinder 1920s chev, it dropped a valve and holed the piston. They drained the oil and removed the rod and piston, picked all the bits of metal out of the oil and put it back in and drove the rest of the way without the rod and piston in! Oh and, tooth paste makes a great valve grinding paste.
I've resurrected cone style limited slip units with the belt sander, just sanded the bottom off the cone until it didn't bottom out any more, then added some extra springs from an old tranny for more bite. It would have been a throwaway otherwise, its still working great 5 years later.
I had a '61 Falcon that i bought in Az that holed a piston the day before i drove it to Wa state. I just backed off the intake rocker, bought a case of oil (24 cans in a case back in '75), and headed out. I laid a smoke trail for 1600mi or so and had to buy more oil, but it made it. Tore it down when i got to my dads in WA. Installed a new piston, spun the engine over and it locked up solid! Turns out I thought it was a 144, but it was actually a 170 The piston had some marks where it hit the head, so i took out the angle grinder and made me a pop-up piston without even taking it out of the block. It ran just fine for about 6 months until i swapped the 6 for a 283 chev.
The Jalopy Journal
