Must have not hit submit last night, which is good because I couldn't do math and wasn't thinking about clearances vs. diameters. My brain is really hurting these days! I was checking pistons and piston to bore, pistons coming up at 3.550 across the board, maybe .001 difference either way.
Set up my bore gauge to 3.550, drop it in, seeing .028 to .030 less across the board, so my clearance is .015. Not bad! Rings are .016 top and .018 2nd - non file fit, mahle moly. That will work.
Getting my spare rod bolts tonight so I can check bearing clearances, just a lot of cleaning, cleaning, should see the shortblock together before the weekend at a minimum, possibly the entire thing.
I need a good used fuel pump hat from somewhere, but that's another story. Foolishly didn't take pictures of my custom walbro solution. It's pretty great, it's just that I had kind of wrecked the wiring on mine because I'm terrible at soldering and I flowed a bunch of shitty solder up the ground lead when I first installed the pump. In the future, I am not going to be soldering on this (or any) car, unless it's a tiny wire that I can't use an 18-22 barrel splice on.
What I am doing now: Gardner bender has heat shrinkable butt splice terminals called GB-Xtreme that are resistant to gasoline, waterproof... they flow sealant out on to the wire jacket. I have a ratcheting crimper. Man, it is a nice operation, if you aren't using these...