Hi and thank you for letting me join the forum!

I have a Lister Blackstone ERSM6 currently under repair and would appreciate some advice. I do have the original instruction/parts manual, but it does leave rather many details out. If anyone have knowledge of these engines and could help me out here I would be very grateful.

As a background, I purchased the engine together with all auxillary equipment (heat exchangers, air tanks, oil tank etc) 'at the side' and have started to install it in a boat. I've got it preliminary lined up against the propeller shaft and am now disassembling and renovating to put things back again by spring-summer next year. All cylinder heads are off, next is pistons and liners. The engine has not been running for approx 30yrs, so I recon I have to replace the double o-rings at the bottom of the liners. Probably need to special order those to be manufactured. Then I plan to indicate crankshaft and level the bedplate accordingly, to finally tighten the 18 M24 bolts (12 for eng and 6 for gear). If everything goes well, I will start it up sometime late summer next year. 

First issue is suitable cylinder head gasket material to manufacture my own gaskets. The old ones are, after many yers of duty, roughly 3mm thick and really compact. Now, question is what new gasket material to what thickness to use to get acceptable compression rates to fill the gap for the up to 0.4mm protruding liner? Usually you want the gasket as thin as possible, but able to get acceptable compression rates over the whole surface. Yes, the max cylinder pressure is listed as 66 kg/cm2, which seems pretty moderate?

Then, if anyone knows any weak spots of this particular engine and have tips on how to correct them, it would be really helpful. Not nice to find internal oil pipes burst while at sea!

Best regards,
Peter