Thanks for some quick responses guys. I talked with the kit supplier and they've sold thousands of these with no complaints about fitment. When I start turning the crank to bring the piston up the bore, I have about 5/8" clearance between the nut on the con rod and the skirt. The I-Beam rod has about 1/2" clearance.When I took a rough measurement to try to get deck to main centerline, I left a bearing half in place, so we're not using the actual bearing bore through the block and caps. Nominal main bearing size on the crank is 3.000", so the I.D. of the block sleeves should be about 3.001". Half of this added to 8.125" gives approximately 9.625". I'll take another look at this making sure the ruler is parallel with the cylinder bore and use the actual block main bore size. On my lunch hour, I dropped the old crank in place, but I couldn't get a piston back in. I wanted to see where the "rebuilt" piston was with respect to the deck.
