quote 51SeaHorseTN27:
Another thought here, if your good with solder and your rods have tang slots you could silver solder tangs on the od of the bushings and dremel them down to fit. But if those rods were designed for roller bearings you wont have tang spots unless the roller cages had tags, most roller cages freewheel as they go around during crank rotoation. Other roller setups use pins to hold the cages, if you had pins in the rod and cap you wouldnt have to worry about perfection or bushing “slip”, you could drill holes in the od and the pins would lock it in. In your case the roundness of the torqued rod and cap is the only tension you have to keep the bushing from sliping, make sure you run as tight a side clearence as you can between the bushing and the crank journal wear surfaces on the counter weights to minimize side to side wear it will put less stress on the piston pin connecting rod geometry at higher rpm an reduce the risk of distorting the rod big end and bushing from lateral movement at higher rpms.
Malcom, thanks for the excellent ideas. My rod ends do not
have tangs, but pinning the inserts in place would work.
The old inserts were very snug on the width, and as I was
trying to re-fit them by sanding down the mating ends of
the inserts, and reamer the hole bigger for the crank,
I didn’t realize the inserts were hanging up on the "fillets",
or raised area, where the journal meets the webs on
the crankshaft. I ended up reaming the crank hole too big,
with no way to correct it as the insert ends were sanded down
as far as they could go. Some simple measuring along
the way would have prevented that. I’ll cut a chamfer
on the new inserts to prevent this problem!
