Hi Keith, I've got my blown Ardun block painted, the 4" Merc crank
installed with the full-floating Ford cad-silver bearings and new 29A
rods, and Ross Flathead pistons. The only snag is that with this
particular Flathead block(there is some variation) when it was decked
down enough to get the 1/8" minimum flat space twixt bores and valve
pockets into which to put the o-ring grooves, to suit the one piece
dead-soft copper gaskets, the pistons were sticking up .050" above the
decks. This would mean that with the normal .050" gasket, the pistons
would be touching the Ardun heads at the edges, an obvious no-no, since
you want at least .050" clearance for everything to 'fling' at high revs
without touching. But this can easily be fixed with no harm by just
using two of the .050" gaskets on each head instead of one.
Building an Ardun is really a fascinating challenge because every piece
and part has to be checked for basic alignments and clearances, timings,
etc. etc. Every Ardun builder does this, whether he tells you or not,
or he doesn't have any degree of success, or get 'The Sound' that Joe
Timney wants to hear when an Ardun goes past his timing stand at Maxton.
My speedshop pal took a long time to do the job on the shortblock parts,
but he achieved remarkable precision; plays those antique machine tools
of his like a violin. I couldn't find the least variation in heights of
the pistons sticking up out of the decks either from end to end, or side
to side. With stock Flatheads, you could find one whole bank with the
pistons 1/16" lower in the decks than the other. Not that it ever hurt
anything, just made the compression a little lower on one side than the
other, and conceivably could have affected the tendency to detonation
through the different squish on the two sides, but detonation was never
a problem on stock Flatheads because Henry didn't allow it to be.
Regards, Bill
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