Doc, where did you get the honing plate? I've asked some of the local machine shops if they have one, and none has. Maybe if I supply the plate, they will use it to do the job right.

Dave W

dwordinger@earrthlink.net

I had the plate shown below made by CJ at Yothers in Alameda, CA.
See: <A HREF="http://www.yother.com/perf.htm">http://www.yother.com/perf.htm</A>
Hone Plates seem expensive but I should have bought mine years earlier after looking at all the money spent borrowing & shipping other people's plates around.
Last I heard, Clifford had a SL6 plate for rent.
DD

What's the purpose of a honing plate? Keeping the cylinder exit straight? Does it wear out quickly?Is it also used to stress the block when align boring the mains?

ahtoews@shaw.ca

The openings on the hone plate I have are at 3.530 so I can finish hone to 89mm (3.504) and never touch the hone plate.
As you noted, the idea is to duplicate the stresses of the torqued down head.
For a nice race engine finish hone job, you can torque down mains and the head to be used onto the empty block and take cylinder measurments. (make a "road map") Remove the head and torque down the hone plate and adjust the bolt torques untill you duplicate your "road map" readings, then do your finish honing. Big money race engine shops (NASCAR) go as far as circulating hot water through the block while they finish hone in order to insure the cylinder is round and to proper size at operating temp.
DD

I was talking to my machinist the other day (top notch race engine builder by the way), and he said that if you don't have torque plates, you can simply use head bolts with a thick stack of washers underneath. Torque them up, and you are pretty close! Reasoning makes sense, since the main cause of distortion is from the bolts pulling on the block.

I'll definetly give it a try on my next /6. It would be easy to check the results with the Doc's "road map" method too!

rios_stephens@hotmail.com