Re-Sleeving We go above an beyond regular re-sleeving process. Here is how: Standard Process: During standard re-sleeving process the block is bored and the sleeve is pressed in, but the grooves and scratches that the cutter leaves behind create air gaps which insulate parts of sleeve from the rest of the block and make uneven heat exchange. In addition they leave a step in the bottom of the bore to stop the sleeve from
moving down. Unfortunately, by doing this it is not uncommon to see pieces of the cylinder bore break away due to stretch in the sleeve as it expands. With the head holding the other end of the sleeve stationary any movement will be at the bottom of the sleeve.
Vallero's process: First, we rough bore the cylinder holes in the block with the block boring machine. At this time we cut a register at the top of the cylinder bore about .200 deep and .300 larger in diameter. The sleeve can now be held totally captive at the top of the cylinder bore by the cylinder head. The block is then moved to the Sunnen CK10 for honing to the correct diameter and finish to receive the sleeve. This assures metal-to-metal contact without air gaps for full heat transfer between sleeve and block. The sleeve is then pressed into the cylinder bore. Then it is back to the CK10 for final honing and plateau honing to the correct size for the pistons. With this process almost any block can be saved from the scrap heap, this is especially important when you have a numbers matching car and engine.
	Parallel Decking We perform parallel decking to assure that he block surfaces are completely parallel from the centerline of the crank to the block surface on all four corners. Many of the early blocks are out of parallel, sometimes by as much as .017. This allows all the cylinders to have the same height in every cylinder. Rod Reconditioning Many of today's rebuilds from other shops do not recondition the
connecting rods to length. However, we feel that this is also one of the many critical steps involved in the complete rebuilding process. If your connecting rods are all different lengths the pistons will go up and down in the block different heights. We use a three step process to recondition each connecting rod. The rods are all measured and the shortest rod is what will be used to determine the best overall length for the rest of the rods. The rod caps are first ground down to a minimum, the large end of the rod is the reassembled and honed on the Sunnen Rod Hone Machine to the correct tolerance to be perfectly round and to a minimum tolerance as a specified factory minimum. The next step involves the small end of the connecting rod, new rod bushings are pressed in and then the bushing is cut on the Tobin Arp Pin Fitting Machine to the correct tolerance. You now have all of your connecting rods the same length!
Honing The honing process is also critical to getting the best out of your rebuild. All of our blocks are honed on the Sunnen CK10. The bores are rough honed to within .004 of size. Then the block is then allowed to sit for a minimum of 4 hours, which allows the center of the bores to shrink back. They are then finish honed with stones that have a soft bonding agent, this allows the stones to break away very rapidly making for a very straight, round and unstressed finish hone. The final plateau hone is done with carbide brushes to knock off any high spots on the crosshatch to assure proper ring seal.