THIS episode of Carnage Plus sees Scotty tackle the first part of his DIY engine rebuild on a spare L67 for our Supermang Berlina, and in true Carnage fashion, it doesn’t go as planned.

In a recent episode, Scotty yanked the crank out of this old engine and found some pretty bad wear in the process. That meant we had to take a trip up the road to Top Torque, where the team linished the rod journals and fine-tuned the crank journals down by 10thou to keep everything happy.

While the crank was away, Scotty gave the bores a quick home-job hone to get them ready for a fresh set of gapped rings.

Top Torque did a ripper job of getting the crank up to spec, but after measuring some bearings, Scotty found a new problem: the clearances were way too tight.

Both the main caps and rod journals came up as too tight with the new bearings, even though we’d theoretically ordered the correct size. We suspect that using ARP studs and bolts for the main and rod caps is probably partly to blame for this due to their extra clamping force.

That meant we had to source even lower-clearance bearings, and it put us further behind on getting the VN back on the road.

As we write this, Scotty is throwing the second set of bearings in and getting the bottom end together, which you’ll see in the next episode of our L67 rebuild.