I think so too. The wear at the bottom of that same cylinder sleeve is kind of weird too. Where the others have a dirty caked oil part down there, this one is almost squeaky clean by comparison other than a slight tint from oil staining. At this point, it's not really unfortunate I suppose, I already decided to pull the trigger on it and plan on dropping the block off at the machine shop later this weekend to get flanged sleeves put in.

 

Anyone have any idea how to check to make sure I don't have a wrist pin problem other than just grabbing the rod and piston and trying to wiggle the assembly? Only reason I ask is because last I checked other than either wrist pin or rings being worn out, I didn't think the piston skirts were EVER supposed to contact the cylinder walls and I have quite a bit of vertical scoring on both the piston skirts and the sleeves...

 

Ouch! Wrist pin diameter - 0.9446 to 0.9448 in. Clearance is 0.0002 to 0.0006 in. between piston pin bore and pin. It looks more like the effects of carbon cutting than surface contact, looks like the oil control rings are stuffed, a couple of nicks.

 

look like plane old fashion piston slap, did that piston come out of one of the end cylinders?

 

Yes sir, that was cylinder number 2, however they all look pretty similar to that.

 

Well I finally have a bit of an update. I dropped the block and most of the rotating assembly off at the machine shop over the weekend, the guys that own the shop have a lot of experience particularly with rover motors. I brought my assembled pistons with me and mentioned my concern about the wrist pins causing the noise and the 2 were convinced it was not that after hearing my video of the noise and taking a look at each piston.

I did some other nosing around now that I have everything apart and it appears that I might have 6 dead lifters, all on the passenger side. I didn't bleed them down before removing them and all the others were rock hard when trying to depress the plunger, other than these 6 which were extremely squishy. Also regarding the lifters, I found a few on the drivers side that were not spinning in their bores every time and were causing the lifters/lifter bores to score along with the lifter bottom and cam lobes



Regarding the piston skirt/sleeve scoring, the machinist is convinced that this is solely from dirty oil and is quite common in motors that haven't had regular oil changes. This would also explain some of my lifter issues.

The last thing I noticed is the upper halves of the rod bearings have definitely seen better days and were all worn through the babbits and were into the copper. It seems that because it ran for a while like this, I mic'd the crank rod journals and they're a few thousandths under proper spec, so looks like a possibility that the rod journals might need ground and oversized bearings added.


Which now leads me to my main question and concern. I'm putting together my parts list to rebuild, however I want to make sure I get quality parts for the rebuild and not cheap Chinese parts that won't last. Being new to Land Rovers in general, I don't know where to shop for the "nice stuff" One of the main things I obviously need is a new cam. I know British Atlantic sells the OE replacement, but is there anyway to tell if it is a quality part or not? The most critical things I'm worried about being quality that I need to buy are going to be new rings, a new cam, new oil pump kit, and main and rod bearings.

 

probably want to get a new timing set, push rods, rocker shafts.

 

I am, just didn't mention it. I'm just going to go ahead and run that roller rocker setup that a member on here designed and manufactures. The kit already comes with the correct lifters and pushrods.

 

roller rocker and cams are great but you ecu is going to shut you down at 5400rpms

 

Why would it do that if I just run everything just as if it were stock? Is that just the factory redline? I'm literally not doing a single one of these things to make power, but to fix what in my opinion is a crap design. The cam is a stock cam, the rockers are the oe ratio, etc etc. Literally the only reason I want it is to get away from the retarded rocker arm shaft setup. I'd be all kinds of grumpy if I get finished putting all this work into this thing just to develop a rocker tick 5k miles down the road.