First of all, I'd like to give a really big thank you to all of the intelligent folks who so kindly provided their advice to my question of a few weeks ago regarding the TO35 with poor compression. I had replaced the valves and reground the seats, but still had no compression on two of my cylinders, and lower than ideal compression on the remaining two. Well, a new set of valve springs, as was suggested, did the trick on all but one cylinder, and gave me enough oomph to start 'er up. When I idled down, however, I heard a bit of a knock, and so I took off the oilpan (not while it was running, obviously.) The number four cylinder, which was the original reason why I had been asked to rebuild this engine, was scored beyond belief on either side of the wrist pin - about an inch wide, and probably 3/32 deep. One of the wrist pin keepers had decided to self-destruct, and had migrated around to the other side in bits and pieces. Then, more of those pieces worked their way into the rod bearing, and also into the rear main. Bad news. The reason I had never seen this was twofold - first, that was the cylinder with the weakest compression, so it must have come to rest each time with that piston at the top of the stroke while another was still compressing. Second, I just plain overlooked it, and I never thought to turn the engine over by hand to look things over. It was all in the head, from what my oil-through-the-sparkplug-hole test told me. It's pretty hard to increase the compression by adding oil to a 3/32 gap... Nevertheless, the owner both forgave my ignorance and also decided he wants to do a complete rebuild, and so I now have a winter project. Well, I have yet another winter project. Thank you once again,
Max
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