Measuring cylinder bore, taper, and out-of-round

We’re going to demonstrate how to measure a cylinder of an engine. And, when we measure it, we’re measuring it for three things: for its bore size, for its taper (so, whether it’s wider at the bottom or the top) and for its out of round (whether it was perfectly round or whether it’s oval-shaped. And, we’re going to do that with a dial bore gauge. Of course, a dial bore gauge can’t measure anything by itself. And so, we’re going to use a micrometer just to set this at zero. So, we found a specification, right here, the standard diameter for the cylinder bore is 3.7795 inches. It gives us a range, but we’re going to set it at the lower number. So, I’m going to set the micrometer at 3.7795. We’ve got a set all ready and locked. Then, we’ll take this to a vise. I put a rag in the vise and I set this inside of here, just lightly, and I, and then I, very lightly, tighten that down. Don’t tighten it very much or you’ll distort this. Then, we find the appropriate attachments for this dial bore gauge. We’ve already done that. And, we put it in here, in between the micrometer. Then, I’m going to rock this back and forth. And, when we see that, we see that dial, that needle change directions. And, this is probably the trickiest part of this whole operation is getting this set to zero. It’s close already. I’m holding the back and rocking it. You’ll notice that needle’s turning around. Let’s see, where is it at? Really close to zero. It’s, turn it just a little bit more. Okay, I think we’re there. The needle’s turning around right at zero. I’ll carefully pull it out and we’ll come over here to the engine block. We’ll start with cylinder number one. And, what I’m going to do is make myself a chart. So, we’re going to measure each cylinder in six different places: three at the top and three at the bottom. So, I’ll make a chart like this– pen, work! So, under number one: top, bottom. And then, I’m going to say, “Position One, Position Two, Position Three.” Now, I’m going to take my measurements. So, I’m always going to use Position One, as it’s perpendicular to the engine block– this is the direction that the piston would rock back and forth. And so, this is where the most wear would occur if there is wear in the cylinder. So, I’ll call this Position One. And, I’ll go down, just below the ring ridge here, so, just down about a half an inch or 3/4 an inch into the cylinder. I’m going to rock this and watch that needle go around and around. And, it stops right there. And, on this dial, each little tick mark is a ten thousandth of an inch and then the large numbers represent a thousandth. So, this is actually just slightly more than two thousandths of an inch larger than the specification. that we set the micrometer to. In fact, to be specific, it’s 2… 2.4 thousands of an inch. So, I can write, at Position One: 0.0024. Now, Position Two. I’m going to do here and Position Three like this. So, we’re just slicing the cylinder into equal slices here. So, Position Two. There, it’s about exactly a thousandth of an inch. And, Position Three will be like this. And, right there, it changes directions. It looks like it’s right on the one thousandth of an inch mark again. So, what these represent is how far, how much larger than the specification the cylinder is here. So, I’ll do the same thing at the bottom of the cylinder. Position One at the bottom: looks like it’s about 18 ten thousandths or 1.8 thousandths. Try it one more time. Or, 19, depending on where I move it to, there’s a little bit of variation. So, we’ll say 18. Okay, now once we have these numbers, here’s where we can calculate our taper and out of round. So, if I look at Position One, top and the bottom, I’m going to come over here and see what was the difference between those two numbers. And, it’s .0006 right? Six ten thousandth of an inch. I’ll do that all the way through here. In this case, there was .0001 and here is .0008. The largest of these three numbers is this one. So, I’m going to call that my taper. The most taper that I found here was eight ten thousands of an inch difference between the top of the bottom of the cylinder. Now, to find my out of round, I’m going to compare these to each other. What’s the difference between the largest and the smallest number? It looks like it’s .0014. And here? .0007. It’s the difference between the largest and smallest measurements we took. The larger of these two numbers, obviously, is this one, so that’s my out of round. Now, you’ll say, “What,what was your exact bore measurement?” So, I’ll come back to my specification here. 3.7795 is my specification. And, I find the largest number that I measured, which was this one. And, I add .0024 to that. So my bore measurement–the largest, the largest measurement in that bore was 3.7819 inches. And now, I’ve taken all of the measurements. And I, I can compare those against my specifications and find out if I need to do anything to my cylinder: if I need to have it bored out or it’s okay to use, as long as everything falls within that specification. And, I’ve also got specifications for out of round and for taper. As long as these numbers fall within those specifications, I can reuse the cylinders like they are: just hone them and reuse them. Otherwise, they have to be bored out. So, so one thing to be aware of is as you take this measurement, if it’s to the right of the zero, It’s actually smaller than the specification. So, in this case, it’s to the right of the zero, it’s smaller than the specification that I set the micrometer to. That doesn’t happen often. Cylinders don’t get smaller, But, for some reason, either our specification is wrong or the cylinder is distorted, that this is showing us It’s three thousandths smaller. If, on the other hand, it stopped over here on the left of the zero, somewhere on this side, that tells us that it’s larger than the specification. That’s most typical.