Depending on the mileage, as long as they have it apart to fix the cylinder, I’d think you might be money ahead to do the complete rebuild. Nothing like a set of new bearings and honed cylinders with new rings, and lapped valves.
[automerge]1589637133[/automerge]
I suppose valve guides too. That could be part of the oil consumption.
The head was done a few years ago with new exhaust valves riding on hardened seats, lapped intake valves, new guides, and improved/upgraded "umbrella" style oil seals.
I had planned to do a quick ring/hone/bearing job myself, but I'll leave it to them to figure out if the bores are out of round enough to need to be bored or if a touch up with a ball hone will work. These blocks have a lot of nickel in them, and at least one machine shop I talked to when I was working through a rebuild myself advised me that they'd charge me more to bore it than they charge for a small block Chevy V8 since most British 4 cylinder blocks will wear out cutters faster than doing 8 cylinders on an American engine.
This is a really, really dangerous rabbit hole to go down though. One of the biggest enemies in these engines is there's a lot of reciprocating mass. The rods+pistons in my engine are around 950g each. There are now CNC rods out of China that several engine builders I know have used that end up a bit over 600g fully dressed with the piston. They are ~$250 for a set of four, complete with ARP bolts.
This engine is probably around 100K miles, which of course is a normal rebuild interval on an engine of this age. The compression is low, but the oil pressure is actually good...
So yeah, I can easily end up getting deep on this project, which is why I've been slowly working on doing one at my own pace with the intent swapping when it was done.
