Whilst I greatly admire the clever work around solutions devised to date to overcome some of the more serious deficiencies on Indian sourced engines such as eccentric idler gear bolts. Together with the expertise forum members such as Butch have been willing to share on this forum (particularly the solution to addressing camshaft valve timing problems).
I am hopeing to make my clone as good as an original lister. trying to think of it as a 90% finished kit engine.
I still hold the opinion that no amount of fettling and burnishing will get you that close to the the quality of a genuine CS.
Why?
Because it is not the defects that you can see and measure for yourself in your home workshop and hopefully rectify or work around, its the hidden stuff that will ultimately catch you out.
Such as:
Raw materials not within the required specification causing lack of surface hardness and or lower material strength of critical components.
Due to raw material feed stock comprising largely of scrap steel, combined with limited material analysis at the micro foundries producing these parts. The presence of undesirable elements such as Lead, Phosphorous and Sulfur (to name a few) in finished raw materials which do not meet the specification for the particular grade of steel required.
Poor quality forgings that have had hidden slag inclusions introduced due to poor quality forging practices, thus allowing forging flash to be recombined with the raw forging. Hence creating stress raisers and ideal starting points for fatigue fractures in rotating or reciprocating assemblies.
Surface finish Ra values not sufficient on critical bearing surfaces.
I could go on, but I think the above starts to give you an idea, of what potentially can be hiding inside one of these engines (I am not saying all Indian sourced engines are like this, because a reliable Indian supplier if given sufficient inducement, will selectively assemble a batch of engines for export to contain what he believes to be the best quality components based upon his prevoius experience of his component suppliers products, also other factors come into play such as how much he values repeat business from the same source verses the extra work load western ideas of quality assurance place upon him).
If like I do, and as detailed in this post:
http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=7667.0 you had sight of a comprehensive strip and evaluation report of an Indian sourced Lister CS clone engine [carried out by no less than Lister Petter themselves], then it would be of considerable interest to anyone who is involved with one these engines.
