I am making some very good progress and enjoying myself. I spent about 4 hours over the past few days with the harbor freight mini needle scaler and it worked fantastic! i was able to get to all spots inside the case. That was good advice and i sure am glad i did it. There was some low hanging fruit like corners of the gov recess ect where you could see pockets of sand but there were also some real surprises. as i needle gun'd along the bottom there were places that looked good and the white paint would blow away and i would get into 1/8" of mill scale or sand or whatever the black dust is. hard to imagine that you would run a factory putting engines together, casting parts and finish machining them with no plan to clean them before assembly. they sloped a light coat of white primer or something in there so on some level they were trying. i draw filed all the machined surfaces and wire wheeled them then wiped the frame out with solvent. i have chosen not to paint the inside red since it has been exposed to oil and i feel the risk of paint flaking off and gumming up the works is higher than the reward of having red paint.
    Then last night I  cleaned assembled the crankshaft support bushing houseings. again they looked fine but when the nedlle scaler went across them sand and scale just flowed off them. I then held an 18" starret level up against the vertical part of the frame where the bearings bolt and laid a starret square on the top and only a tiny bit of  light was visible so i am calling that square enough. I assembled the main bushing hoseings metal to metal without the crank. tightened  them up then took a set of inside mics and measured the top bottom front and back clearince between the bushing thrust surfaces. bushings were about .003 tighter at top than bottom. measured crank  with a big set of 6-9" mics at work and they show that the gear is not on quite square, off again by about. .003 from top to bottom. did the math for my shims and came up with .122 difference. divided by 2 is .061. the indians had .060 of gaskets on both sides with a .004 shim on the top. the measurements show how the bushings were closer on top than bottom so somebody over there was on the ball and aware of the issue. I made new gaskets out of 1/16" garlock (.062") then assembled the whole assembly with crank this time and it would bind a little bit as a rotated the crank through the top, even though feeler gauges showed .004 clearance all the way around. I made one more paper shim out of .005 and installed it and now it spins real nice. falls right to the bottom under it's own weight so I called the crank good to go with .010 of thrust clearance as measured with feeler gauges.
    This morning i put the idler gear in and temporarly installed the cam since you got me worried about them now. at a glance i would be totally happy with that backlash. i have been into tractor transmissions that had gears this size to move the whole machine with  way more backlash than this. I ran a piece of lead solder through the idler and crank gears and get bits of lead .008-.010 thick. then ran a bit of lead solder through the idler to cam gear and got .010-.018 thick. i can't imagine taking the time to build an offset bolt to close it up .006 would make the difference of a tinkers ass in hell. If those gears are junk they are junk. I did have a bit of white paint on one of the gears from when i took it out. i reached in with the wire wheel to clean it off and you could clearly see the marks from the wire wheel in the gear tooth i touched so they are super soft, usually a file will just skate off a gear tooth. so i guess i will just run it for a while and if they look like they are wearing i will make myself a whole set of gears from scratch. I have the tooling and have always wanted to make a gear. I know you can buy gear blanks to machine your self. here is the project as it sits now after a lot of cleaning.

I am also looking for some clearance's . I have heard a few thrown around about striking clearance (.45 for my 8/1 from my manual that came with it in the crate)  and crank pin clearance (.0015-.003 from here on this forum) but am looing for the thrust clearance between the crank and the main bushings. I see that the Indians had a small piece of gasket under the top of one bushing carrier to shim the top out away from the main frame. as well as multiple gaskets stacked on every thing on the whole engine.  I have forgotten the thumb rules in the manuals I used to have access to when I serviced IR gas line compressors but I thought it was .001" per inch of shaft diameter. I also worked on AJAX engines and they had all splash lube oil systems. from rebuilding many engines I learned that more stuff got trashed with tight clearance than loose so I always erred on the loose side on the engines I worked on.  piston ring end gaps close up as rings heat up and scuff cyl walls, rods and pistons expand out and close up striking clearnces as they heat up ect ect....

the engine came with a cast iron gear. DES provided a  full set of spare parts and that gear was also cast. i wish i had the bronze one but i think i will put some hours on what i have before i dump any more money into parts. this could easily turn into a rabbit hole. i think as long as i inspect the gear condition during oil change time i will be able to see if it's wearing funny. maybe i will do a prussion blue gear mesh check before i run it just to see if everything seems lined up.

no rebar. just standard 6 bag mix in the first half then extra Portland in the last 6" or so. I did toss in some big rocks to make the job go quicker.

i don't need a tank because i plan on running it off a bulk tank. i also plan on an elevated foundation as recomended. it makes me sad thinking about the poor people and how little they have. i wish they could get up to where we are. but then again what glimpses we have here of the past are usually our best examples to have stood the test of time. the best barns, best old houses, best old factories. leading us to believe this country has always been this good. if you really study old pics of a old logging camp or leather tannery with shanty town beside it i wonder if it was closer to india or china here 130 years ago than we would like to admit. i have a series of books called "echos from oil country". written first hand by an engine mechanic about his exploits in the western pa oilfields in the 1880. if you think you are a mechanic you won't after reading what he did with so little to  work with.  cutting new flywheel keys in the woods with nothing but a cold chisel and file. truing non parallel crank pins with files. casting new parts in the field with a home made foundry made from sand from the local creek, using the cracked flywheel as both the pattern and then breaking it up and melting it down to reuse the cast iron in his mold. i bought the books from lindseys when they were still in business. i think oldtimey book store has his stuff now.

i was like a kid on chrismas morning. my wife thought it was funny that i kept smiling.  this is all the bits that were in the smaller box. not sure what the little green plastic straps are for in the plastic bag.

then the frame out of the crate sitting on the floor to kind of get an idea of how large a foundation i will need to pour.

i may go that route, for now i ordered 2 gb160 avr's off ebay and will try and see how they perform compared to the rheostat. i took the generator apart and cleaned and repacked the bearings last night. now it is all back together. that 10k rotor is a real handfull to slip back in without scraping it along the windings. very heavy. i also installed zirk fittings on the bearings and screen on the bottom where the mice will try to get in. my 8/1 clone arrived in the mail today so i may start another thread and show how the process goes as i  pour a foundation and grout the engine.