Thread: Sleeving a Block

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Originally Posted by 69Bee

Another thing to consider with sleeving all of the holes, is to have the mains align bored or honed. There can be some block/main distortion from all of the added stresses (sleeve interference fit). If you did this in my shop, with or without the sleeving, I would be recommending the align hone anyway. Sleeve first, then align hone to establish main bore roundness and alignment, then square (deck) the block. Once that is done, bore the sleeves so that the holes are perpendicular to the deck.

Now that sounds like the ticket. Seems like you may have done this once or twice lol. Is there any information that I need myself before bringing it to a shop like yourself, or can I bring it to a shop with the idea in mind that I want it to spin 10k and sleeve it and they will know how far they can go in terms of bigger bore and stroke or not so much? In all reality I would like to learn to do the machine work myself but for one the equipment is all kind of expensive and I'm not sure how many blocks I can ruin before I am broke lol. Thank you much for the informative answer tho, best description I have seen of how to do it.

Originally Posted by Capecreations21

.... Is there any information that I need myself before bringing it to a shop like yourself, or can I bring it to a shop with the idea in mind that I want it to spin 10k and sleeve it and they will know how far they can go in terms of bigger bore and stroke or not so much?

You definitely CANNOT just carry your block to any machine shop and expect to get back what you want. There are tons of old posts here about guys spending big $$$ and being disappointed with what they got back. And just because a shop tells you "...we sleeve blocks all the time" doesn't mean they know beans about sleeving all the bores, punching it to the max while keeping it reliable, and balancing it to spin. You need a good "performance machine shop" that understands building race engines where the guy is smarter than you about how it's done, but still listens to you for what you want, and explains why it'll work or why not - the shop that can point to a proven track record of successful builds. My $0.02 on it.

Originally Posted by rspears

You definitely CANNOT just carry your block to any machine shop and expect to get back what you want. There are tons of old posts here about guys spending big $$$ and being disappointed with what they got back. And just because a shop tells you "...we sleeve blocks all the time" doesn't mean they know beans about sleeving all the bores, punching it to the max while keeping it reliable, and balancing it to spin. You need a good "performance machine shop" that understands building race engines where the guy is smarter than you about how it's done, but still listens to you for what you want, and explains why it'll work or why not - the shop that can point to a proven track record of successful builds. My $0.02 on it.

That's some good advice for sure, and yes I did see a couple of posts involving people having bad luck with block builds in my quick search for wherei should post this.. Anyway, I couldn't agree more a performance shop is definitely the way to go, I guess I asked if I could just explain what I want because I don't know how to calculate the specs myself, that would I imagine be the easiest way is if I knew exactly what I wanted the dimensions to be?

Originally Posted by Capecreations21

That's some good advice for sure, and yes I did see a couple of posts involving people having bad luck with block builds in my quick search for wherei should post this.. Anyway, I couldn't agree more a performance shop is definitely the way to go, I guess I asked if I could just explain what I want because I don't know how to calculate the specs myself, that would I imagine be the easiest way is if I knew exactly what I wanted the dimensions to be?

That's where the "...guy (that) is smarter than you about how it's done, but still listens to you for what you want" part plays in. You don't need to be able to give a good guy all of the measurements. That's what you're paying him for. I'd point you to a shop that I would trust for that kind of a build, but you'd be traveling about 1700 miles one way