We torqued each main cap and bearing in place and measured the bore diameters with a dial gauge. Then, by swapping bearing halves from one bore to another, we got perfect 0.0025-inch bearing clearances for all five mains.
Upon trial assembly we found one stripped headbolt hole. It was easily fixed with a Heli-Coil kit and this drill jig from Manley Performance Products. If you don't drill the head bolt hole straight, you'll be in a world of misery down the road and this jig solves that problem.
Since even Total Seal's gapless second rings still use a gapped top ring, we carefully checked each ring set in its bore. We used total Seal's battery powered ring grinder to set our top rings at 0.028-inch, because nitrous is in this motor's future. Our homemade ring-squaring tool is just visible in the upper right corner, sitting on the block. We fabbed it from two pieces of ABS drain pipe for about $5.
Preparing for final assembly, we completely deburred each piston's dome and face and the inner id of each valve spring using a convoluted deburring wheel from Standard Abrasives mounted on a 3/4-hp bench grinder.
One trick part we added to this block was simple hardware store drain plugs. We screwed the plugs into the block's coolant drain holes making it easy to drain water for radiator flushing and for swapping engine parts.
We used ARP's moly assembly lubricant and a rod bolt stretch gauge to properly establish connecting rod bolt preload. Also note the ARP main cap bolts we added to the block before the first machining process even began.
Total Seal provided its slick adjustable piston ring compressor for our buildup and we installed a Comp Cams beltdrive to allow quick cam timing changes on the dyno.
Most beltdrives use shims stacked together to set endplay. Comp's drive uses a trick eccentric plate, allowing fast and accurate adjustments. We set our cam's endplay at 0.005-inch. We sealed ARP's head studs to the block with high-temp RTV silicone prior to screwing them in hand tight.
Using tools from Powerhouse, we installed our new Comp Cams street roller grind (PN 11-770-8). This cam features 236/242 duration at 0.050 and 0.647/0.654 lift and a 110-degree lobe separation angle. Even with this mild grind our baby Rat was still able to pull 16-inches of idle vacuum and pump out over 500 hp.