The original dream was to pull the sleeves and contemplate the idea of going to 66mm bores. L.A. Sleeve will make the custom sleeves for $170 USD a piece x 6 = $1020 which for me translates to $1356 CDN and too rich for my blood at this point. Maybe down the road I can see my way clear to doing this so on to Plan B.
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First I want to talk about what I found after I removed the sleeves.
Starting with the cylinder block- Found to be in reasonably good shape. Note the brownish staining at the top. Iron oxide (rust). This indicates to me that the upper o rings on some of the liners were leaking coolant, but this engine was not torn down for a leak in to the cylinders so the head gasket did its job even though the o rings on the upper cylinder sleeves should have contained the coolant. This leads me to believe that oversized sleeves to accommodate 66mm pistons would not be a problem as long as the head gasket seals the coolant from the cylinders.
The interior of the cylinder block was for the most part was spotless indicating to me that the coolant was doing its job as far as the aluminum parts of the system is concerned.
The double o ring grooves in the bottom of the cylinder block took a lot to clean up because of the sealant ? product Kawasaki used to install the sleeves, but in the end, they cleaned up fine.
The 6 cylinder Sleeves as found - Really ugly. The corrosion / build up tells me that something was not right with the coolant specified and after researching, I've determined that the Ethylene Glycol as specified was inappropriate because it didn't accommodate the ductile iron liners, so I've put some thought in to where to go from here.
First - the majority of the scale / rust cleaned off the sleeves with a flat file in about 20 minutes per sleeve. Now the question is should some type of coating be put on the sleeves to minimize future corroding? I'm still researching this. Darton Sleeves supplies their MID sleeves with a zinc phosphate coating. zinc Phosphate when applied to steel, leaves a porous surface and is primarily used to absorb oil lubricants on the surface to prevent corrosion or to help lubricate newly machined components during break in. One good example is new camshafts supplied with a black finish. I'm just not sure how zinc Phosphate would work here.
Diesel antifreeze contains Nitrite which precipitated out of the coolant and plates out on the steel components of the coolant system to wave off corrosion, so maybe a nitrite treatment would be appropriate on these sleeves before reinstallation and then use a coolant product for diesel engines so as to minimize corrosion of the sleeves. ( I'm leaning in this direction)
Whatever gets applied to the sleeves has to be compatible with the sleeves, the cylinder block (aluminum) and the coolant.
The biggest concern I have to deal with is the sleeves at the bottom where the 2 o rings seal. Note - that the area between the 2 sealing bands on the liner also shows pitting, indicating to me that the upper o ring had failed, allowing the coolant to weep in to this area and had it not been for the second o ring below, there would have been a coolant leak in to the crankcase.
Now, in order to reuse the sleeves, I need to clean up the sleeves so that the o rings will seal. I can't take off any material from the sleeves because they are an interference fit in the block.
A process we used in ( of course) the nuclear plant, was to build up the pitted area with copper plating, then polish off the area to the base metal, thus filling in the pits, and then flash plating the surface with nickel plating. It's time consuming but doable. I've contacted Caswell Plating and asked if it was appropriate to do this on ductile iron and they replied that it's a common practice, so I guess I'm getting into plating the sleeves just in the area that needs repair. Brush plating is ideal for this , so time for me to "tool up" and get on with it.