50 miles on new truck and burning coolant.

[Dave Sponaugle]

Your question is a very double edged, and rather sharp at that. If SCA's have never been run in the engine, cavitation erosion may be present but not all the way through the cylinder walls right now. What is bad, if you bore or hone the block, you may cut into a cavitation pocket that is getting close to the cylinder inside surface but not through yet. If the engine has had SCA's run in it from day one, you have a much better chance of this not happening. As far as sleeves, I had a very bad experience with them. When my engine was getting oil thirsty, I bought a complete drop in 7.3 turbo reman engine from a national re builder that had been sleeved. 28,000 miles and three cracked blocks later when they sent me the fourth engine under warranty, I tore it down while still bolted to the shipping pallet. The engine had never been fired, and the sleeves were all dropping below the deck. The 7.3 sleeves are where the fire ring on the head gasket rests, so all the pressure when you torque the heads down is resting on the sleeves, pressing them down into the block. As that happens, it puts more pressure on the block and the clamping force on the head gasket fire rings decreases till the head gaskets fail or the block cracks, maybe both. Here is a picture of a 6,600 dollar boat anchor. If you look at the magic marker lines, you can tell the sleeves are not flush with the block deck, and you can see the crack between the lines. Now a little more about the reman process I saw on those engines. Out of four engines, I usually saw four or five sleeves in each engine. All of the engines were bored 20 over. I guess that helped with only needing to stock one piston and ring size. Because of the sleeves dropping, none of the head bolts had the correct amount of torque on them. That was compounded by entirely to much assembly lube on the head bolts, some were little more than finger tight. Bolts were stripped out where it was assembled with an air gun in intake and ehaust manifolds. End of the story is I refused to install the fourth engine. About two months of haggling and I got a buy out, bought a 6.9 salvage yard engine and rebuilt it myself. As far as sleeves go, I saw a post in here recently that someone was running an engine with sleeves from the same place mine was from, and they had 100,000 miles on it. Locally none of the engine machine shops will touch a 7.3 engine because of the problems with sleeves. When I went to the best shop, he did not want to touch mine, but when I told him how I wanted to do the 6.9 with no sleeves and a minimum bore and explained the block differences, he agreed to do it but accepted no responsibility. Three years later and knowing how I run it, how much boost and fuel I am running, he will now build 6.9 engines. But he will not touch a 7.3.