I am an old Ford fan recently converted to SBC thinking so it is great to see the Fordnatics come forth with tech stuff. It seems to me that "afanoni" is a lady who writes well and she is to be encouraged, I can't get my wife into the garage unless it is to look at some clean new piece of stainless beauty and I catch a lot of heat if I don't wipe my feet coming in from the garage, so I can understand why she might not be receptive to a relatively easy process of pulling the crankcase pan. That is surely an easy but quite dirty job. Still why be upset over a repairable T-bird that only cost $2200? That sounds like a good deal to me if there is minimal body rust. If it is a 410 and you can clean it up, get it painted and fix the interior and enjoy it. I don't understand the difficulty of micing the bore depth, the local shops I used to be familiar with would send a guy with a few different micrometers to any garage contemplating an engine build to at least indicate out-of-round cylinders and what is so hard about finding a depth gauge micrometer? It should be possible to find a shop that will do this for a very small fee and your mechanic should know who to call? So why not pay the mechanic to pull the pan and ID the crank or find someone with a depth micrometer?

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder