After a month of gestation, the Diamante block and 3000GT crankshaft are back from the machine shop. This is a new shop to me - it's a one man operation and he has the best reputation in town among the racing crowd.

The block is cleaner than I'm used to seeing from most shops - it's been decked 0.006"..... that's more than I had hoped would be necessary, but that's what it took to clean up the etching around the fire ring areas. It's also been over-bored 0.020" and align honed. For those interested, ARP main studs do tighten the main bores a hair at the parting lines, so I would suggest align honing if anyone uses the main studs...... otherwise, the alignment of the bores was spot-on:




The crankshaft has been balanced.... it was almost perfectly balanced as it was, but it's now on-the-money and it polished out very nicely:


The 3SX rods were dang near perfect right out of the box - balanced within 0.5 grams big end/little end/total weight. We decided not to drill the oil squirter hole in the rods and I'll depend on splash lubrication for the major thrust face of the cylinders. I guess time will tell if that was a good decision.

The pistons were also spot-on - all within 0.5 grams weight difference.

The crankshaft was balanced using a new OE rod bearing for reference, but I changed to Sealed Power bearings after I saw the price of the OE main, rod and thrust bearings..... have they ever gone crazy! $400 (with a discount) is nuts when Sealed Power was less than $100. I did compare the weight of the 2 rod bearings and they're within 0.5 grams, so I should still be good on the balance job.

So, Sunday I'll wash and paint the block and get this mess started once again.

Frank