What did I find?

Well, it was never a race motor although I had fun racing it. It was a cheap rering with a 10-10 crank. Back in 1987 it had .004" bore taper as best I could measure. In all that time it only wore to .006" taper, and some of my '80s honing marks are still there. I looked up factory specs and they say .010" max taper....So I said to heck with it and slapped it back together.

Crank had minor scratches, bearings were slightly beat up but no serious problems I could detect so I just polished the crank by hand and put new bearings in it. For clearance, back in the '80s I had Dad's snap gauges (which I gave up on real quickly) and plastigauge. I later aquired better tools and knowledge of how to use them....

With an econo dial bore gauge and good mics in hand, I'm not sure why, but the main bearing clearance gets larger moving towards the back of the block. It varies from .0026 at the number one main, and .0035 at the rear main I'm blaming sloppy machine work and the lack of an align hone. Again, not a race motor and never was, worked just fine.

rod bearing clearnace is much more uniform, tighter than I remember with the tools I had back then, but I used a different brand of bearing so that probably affected it? (fm/sealed power now, michigan 77 back then). Two rods are at .002, the rest are at .0015. Yep, should work fine.

I expected to find the rod bearings in bad shape, because in the 80s I replaced the rod bolts without resizing the rods, a definite no-no. But nothing happened, the bearings were actually pretty nice. I think what saved me is that I used direct connection rod bolts....which were exactly the same dimensions as stock (and were probably just reboxed stock rod bolts anyway). I would never do that again....

What else...the 284/484 purple shaft wore beautifully.
In 14 years of abuse, it only wore .004 off the lobes.
The lobe taper has JUST disappeared, so now it is finally time to change it I even labeled the lifters with their position, because they all have "this is the ideal wear pattern: you will never see this in real life" appearance. I would not sell it, it is not THAT good....I briefly considered giving it away but will probably scrap it....but it did it's job well.

And that's about it for now. The short is back together.