Been too busy to take all to many pics and post an update in a few days. I finally got my heads back from the machine shop on Tuesday.
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He took .009 off of each head. I hope that wasn't too much. I told him to stay under .005 but he obviously doesn't listen. He also didn't listen to me when I told him which valve stem seals to put in them. I told him intake gets posi seals the exhaust just put the retainer cap seal on. He put posi seals on both of them. So I hope he didn't just set me up for the dreaded 90k mile valve drop the 7.3's are so prone to getting. I wasn't about to tell him, take those off and put the other ones on though because it would have likely taken him another 2 months to pull those 8 valve springs.
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Anyway. Lots of progress tonight, FINALLY! My brother made the intake hat spacer I needed for my Extreme Velocity intake hat to work on our engines. (I used this intake hat to take advantage of the 3" intercooler piping the Cummins charged air cooler uses.) With that 4" spacer my bother machined I can easily service glow plugs or other items without messing with the intake hat. The real tricky part will be figuring out the routing of the IC piping when the thing comes all together.
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I finished cleaning all the gasket surfaces yesterday. I finished "setting in" all of the head stud threads today as well as completed the honing of the cylinders.
I did 3 up-downs in each cylinder one way and then turned the block over and did it the other way 3 times to get the cross hatch and checked what I had and it looked good enough to me. I don't want to over size these bores too much.
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I'm really hoping to get atleast the short block assembled tomorrow. If anyone has any tips or advice I may not know of for this process feel free to shout them out.