I assembled the AeroVee over the period 7-9 August with assistance from my brother, who flew all the way from Perth. I wanted an experienced mechanic on hand in case things went wrong - which they did. Assembly started with heating the timing gear and freezing the crank shaft. I froze the shaft over night and heated the gear to 260 degrees C. Half way on, it stuck, so I thought my whole world was about to end. However, I gave it one last push and on it went - relief! After that, I put it aside for a day or so and repeated the exercise for the prop hub. After all the horror stories I have read about, I was prepared for a challenge, however, it actually slid straight on without the need to hammer it. I used the impact wrench to set the nut, but the actual hub slid right into place without any interference. 

We had a bit of binding between the forward two conrods and the cam shaft, but that was easily sorted with a bit of filing and polishing. The next issue was that both halves of the forward thrust bearings were a tad too wide for the cam shaft. I had to use a piece of wet and dry and gently sand the edge until it offered no interference with the cam shaft. Once that was done, it took a bit of fiddling to get the crank shaft bearings aligned to the dowl pins, but we got there in the end. 

The next challenge was one of the cylinder threaded stud inserts was badly threaded and required tapping. Not a big deal, but annoying as I had to travel to a special machining shop to get the required tap. After that, the cylinder studs went in easily. Assembling the case and the pistons into the cylinders was pretty straight forward and went well. The next challenge was the lifters. You have to trim them to size and then insert the ball ends. Only trouble is that the ball end inserts were way too big for the lifters inner diameter - out by about 0.5mm. This is way too much for a simple heat and insert process, so we had to ream the holes out to fit the inserts. We reamed them to 6.7mm, which gave the inserts a nice snug fit - still had to tap them in with a rubber mallet, but all went in without a drama. Another job was to trim three studs each side that protruded too far out of the head, and interfered with the rocker assembly.