sleeves

[Sailwood]

Since I now know that I have an early model, which makes it at least 30 years old, I am concerned about the water jacket. When does one re-sleeve? Are there sleeves in the first place? (my '58 TR3 had them). Any other areas of concern in this regard that are potentially devastating from the point of repairability?

Doug Soden
ASPEN C29 #131 1965

[Don Moyer]

Doug,

While sleeving is sometimes a very good option during a rebuild, it's not necessarily the case that an engine needs to be sleeved simply as a function of years in service. There are at least two situations where installing a sleeve (or sleeves) makes especially good sense:


The sand cores for the water jackets in some blocks (thankfully very few) were apparently not centered very well during casting, which left the lower one to two inches of the bores quite thin along one side of the block and needlessly thick on the other side. Over the years, these thin spots develop pinhole leaks. These blocks are usually in excellent condition otherwise, and are good candidates for sleeving.


Sometimes one of the bores will have suffered damage from a foreign object. In these cases, we will sleeve only the affected bore if the other bores appear to be in good condition.


In certain high-time engines, bore wear might be so high as to require .020" or .030" over-sized pistons. In these cases, we usually consider it to be advisable to sleeve the block back down to standard. In these blocks, sleeving is particularly attractive financially if the original pistons are reusable.


With respect to the condition of the rest of your block, one of the best places to check for corrosion is to note the number of threads remaining in the manifold stud holes. Three threads are considered minimum before installing a threaded bushing or other equivalent thread replacement, but even in this case, we would not necessarily install sleeves. Be sure to check the upper circumference of these holes, because the upper part tends to corrode somewhat faster than the lower part. As a point of reference, the newest block we ever saw had 6 threads in the location of the manifold stud holes.

Best regards,

Don Moyer