Meteor 357XPG cylinder change a.k.a. Anti Climax for Saturday morning - Finland Edition

[300whisper]

My plan for the day was to replace cylinder on my 357XPG. As you might notice, old cylinder has seen some better days. Freebie from buddy of mine few years ago. There is nothing wrong with it, just few cooling fins missing after timber rolled over and was ditched.



Anyway, went to my stash and took brand new Meteor kit which I had previously prepared by opening up lower transfers, polished exhaust port etc. Everything went fine, applied thin layer of RTV and started to fit intake boot with partition, three times. Was bit of confused, do I have wrong partition and wrong intake boot, maybe 346? Checked parts throughly. No, parts were correct. Then, why in the hell gap between machined portion and partition looked suspiciously wide?
Took out my trusty Mitutoyo and measured machined portion. Oh, it is just machined ~0.1” deeper, that’s why gap looked so big.

Back to fitting the cylinder.
Squeesed piston rings and started to push cylinder down, when partition touched crank case, cylinder started to tilt forward. Cylinder bolts were almost impossible to get lined up with holes in crank case. Back to square one, cylinder and partition off, old scrapped 357 cylinder from scrap bin. It took me a while to realize machined portion was left too long. I had to measure it twice to believe it.



Outside length of machined area in Meteor cylinder is .5260” (13.36 mm). Same length in OEM cylinder .4370” (11.10 mm).
Inside legth of intake measured against piston in Meteor .8900” (22.60mm) and OEM .8210” (20.85 mm).

Always something with Meteor (and other aftermarket parts), if it isn’t flaking of nikasil, it f**ked up machining/ casting. In short period of time I have seen crooked intakes and exhaust ports. In the past I have used Meteor cylinders, 2 on 372XPGs and Meteor pistons on my 357XPGs. No problems with flaked plating or anything problematic.
Needless to say, this was my last Meteor cylinder. I’m done with this s**t. From now on only with OEM.

And I’m one of those poor suckers without lathe and or mill.

 

[300whisper]

Small victory! Took hacksaw and couple of files and got into work. Spent about an hour after measuring and marking the line.
Filed surface is within 20 thousands which is perfect in my book for this kind of application.

 

[EFSM]

Aftermarket things almost always need fiddled with. Side covers, chain tensioners, chain brake handles, pistons, cylinders, carburetors, you name it. I recently put Golf pistons in a couple 562's. The pistons were nice but had some remarkable bad wrist pin clips with them. The groove for the clips was ground way deeper than OEM so I couldn't use the old ones. I ended up using some Echo clips I had laying around.

 

[300whisper]

I should know that. I avoid using chinesium parts, except one muffler in one of my saws. So far I have been lucky with Meteor, two cylinder kits on my 372XPs, but third time is charm, I quess.

What baffles me most in a times of CNC machining, how this kind of thing is even possible? One stage of machining just didn't happen? If there is one cylinder with long intake, there should be hundreds cylinders like this in the market.

With proper GO and NO GO gauges in machine shop this would be avoidable but that would be too much to ask.