Great work
I will watch with real interest the process of getting the top deck of the crankcase perpendicular to the centre-line of the bore and how that relates to the crankshaft being perpendicular to it, and getting the crush right for clearance at the piston/head interface, and how "square" the piston comes out in relation to the plane of the head . . .
Will be really interesting to see how all that comes out in an engine that is 3/4 of a century old - it may need no work at all to be in tolerance?
I'm interested in the comparison between how it will measure up compared with what has needed doing to some Indian ones to make them straight, vertical, square, perpendicular etc etc
I'm interested, too, in how you will address bolting it down to a base and getting each "foot/corner" snug down to the base without loading any of them up more than the others
Everyone's approaches to these questions seems to be slightly different
The process that you have gone through with examining the cylinder, thinking about the wear and where it is; then thinking about the low working revs, big rotational masses and under-stressed design and coming up with the conclusion that the bore is "serviceable" (which is a sensible conclusion IMHO) - I will be very interested to see how that sort of thinking applies to the other dimensional questions.
After all, lots of them have done decades of work just "as they are". IMHO there is a combination of two things happening there:
Over-built design, good metallurgy, generous but well-thought-out tolerances, low working temperatures and low RPM
That, and all combined with the experience of decades of building and refining the design of these things that lived inside the head of the design engineers who had the benefit of seeing hundreds of these and earlier designs working really hard over years and decades and whose observations influenced the designs in small subtle ways that we probably can't see and that the Indians certainly don't know about
Down here at the Bottom of the World, many hundreds of these machines ran sheep-shearing shed where they would work 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week for a couple of months twice a year, powering the overhead shafts that drove the machines which shore (sheared?) tens of thousands of sheep every year. Typically installed in the '30s or '40s, many were still working loyally into the '70s and '80s as the cost of getting electricity to remote farm sites was too high to afford
I will be interested to watch a well-documented rebuild of an example of these
Thanks, Mike