Any one interested in the oiling mods I did?

gregcon said

Here is the front of the block, and the crankcase also. You can see all the extra iron in the main webs.

There is an ugly secret to these R blocks. But first let me ask you - what would you think if I told you I had a small block that had a 4.35" bore and could hold a 4.25" crank no problem? It can also mate up with some very serious-flowing heads that are readily available.

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LOL, that would have to be something with the bore centers moved. IIRC the bore spacing on the SBM is 4.400 so I *THINK* the biggest bore for that spacing is 4.200 or 4.220. The head gasket gets mighty thin between the cylinders when the bores are that big, and the center cylinders on both sides would have a big heat load at the gasket where the exhaust valves are.

That bore and stroke would take some serious cylinder heads. It would be impressive if you can fit it in there.

Thanks for the pictures. I thought I had some paper work on the R3 block around here and I’m thought it said those blocks clearly have priority main oiling. I guess you can call it that if you never need to oil the lifters, but once you do, it’s not really priority oiling at all. If you kick a lifter out of the bore you’ll have a leak before the main bearings instead of after it.

It looks like they did clock the main oil feed closer to 12 o’clock than the OE stuff or even the X block. My R block isn’t here right now, but I’m pretty sure the oil feed holes are a bit further apart than those.