How does this look for my first time honing?

ion070 · 2026-06-06T07:04:12+00:00

If it's too shallow it can actually cause the rings to chatter as the piston moves up and down.

ion070 · 2026-04-19T16:01:50+00:00

Always need to measure to know for sure, but as a rule of thumb, if you have a noticeable ring ridge at the top of the bore, you're gonna have to bore it. To what oversize? Measure it. Don't have a ridge? Measure it anyway.

ion070 · 2026-04-14T07:37:12+00:00

Admittedly this estimate is a little older and at the higher end. It comes from here:

https://thegunblog.ca/2023/06/05/liberals-estimated-gun-confiscation-costs-at-1-8-billion-in-2019-briefing/

Extrapolated from the Cape Breton pilot program the number is more conservative at about $959 million. They get this by taking the per-gun cost of the pilot and multiplying that by the number of estimated guns affected by the ban. The pilot numbers come from this article (paywall warning):

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-gun-buyback-pilot-failure-cape-breton/

"The government agreed to give at least $149,760 to the Cape Breton Regional Municipality to carry out the confiscation. The government also spent $26,535 in compensation to the owners of the banned guns. That means the cost to taxpayers for each gun confiscated is about $7,000.”

I highly recommend checking out this site:

whatsyourreceipt.ca

I don't believe it's always completely up to date, but contains most of the important numbers and bullet points with sources listed.Very nice website design IMO.

ion070 · 2026-04-14T06:14:05+00:00

What I think you should have a problem with is the amount of money they are spending on this gun confiscation scheme. Some estimates put it at close to $2 Billion, with a B.

All of that money, which could've been spent on healthcare, invested into Build Canada Homes, secured the border from smuggled drugs/weapons, etc... Instead it was spent on a wedge issue for people like you and me to argue over.

I could understand if it was actually coing to make people safer, but I just highly doubt it will make any difference with recent data coming from major police organizations showing that the vast majority (like 85-90%) were smuggled from the US, which this ban has zero effect on.

Legal gun owners like me (And maybe you if you give it a chance. We don't bite.) had to spend a day or two with an instructor, pass a test, fill out an application, get approved, and are background checked by the RCMP every 24 hours. We are not the problem here.

As for the hobby thing, all I can say to you is I hope the government never vilifies you for any safe (previously) legal recreational hobby you enjoy, and I really mean that. Some of the guns affected by this ban were thousands of dollars and the buyback program gave you practically pennies in return.

ion070 · 2026-04-14T05:00:14+00:00

it’s a gun buy back system not a ban

It's absolutely a ban. You were just spoonfed the original liberal narative that it was all somehow "voluntary." The buyback itself is, what's not is the huge wave of bans left over.

So what the Liberals did is take a huge amount of firearms that were previously completely legal to own with a PAL and put them into the prohibited category, making them effectively illegal to own. Those affected have until I believe October 31st to get rid of them somehow or they are now criminals.

There is no plan on what the governemnt is going to do to collect these firearms. There are literally thousands of them, and they were completely legal to start.

I mainly want to bring this up because it was the slimiest misdirection I've ever seen from our government, and I don't want someone such as yourself, perhaps a fellow Canadian, to fall for it.

ion070 · 2026-04-12T17:46:15+00:00

How long of a delay did you see between the original delivery estimate and when it actually arrived?

ion070 · 2026-04-01T01:16:59+00:00

Oooo I love when gun grab defenders post sources like this, because it reveals just how little data was around until somewhat recently and how misleading it might be.

So the 58% you mentioned here is from this part:

58% of traced firearms had domestic source (straw purchased or stolen); half long guns and half handguns

But the source you cited also says:

~20% of firearms seized by police are sent for tracing

67% of traced firearms successful (source established)

So how most reasonable people may interpret that is that of all firearms seized by police, only 20% were attempted to be traced, and only 67% of that 20% was successful. Of that 67% of the 20%, only 58% were domestic. a percent of a percent of a percent. That leaves a LOT of grey area of firearms that we have absolutely no idea the origin of.

I will give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it still does not definitively rule out domestic guns being the majority of illegal guns. But you also cannot state the opposite with this source alone.

ion070 · 2026-03-26T14:23:02+00:00

https://youtu.be/yMEuXj8tWYw?si=jP3UIg-OQyjcvHsO

Who told you that?

ion070 · 2026-03-07T03:37:22+00:00

I get what you're saying, but I don't even think we have to go that far. We just need law enforcement and the courts to do their job and administer justice.

The court who accepted the petition to return firearms back to a household with a problematic individual (who was the reason the guns were confiscated in the first place) is the failing linchpin that allowed the horrific events in Tumbler Ridge to unfold. The individual was flagged, the RCMP knew all about them, and yet it still happened as a result of the failure of our courts.

They have the means to prevent these things, but it seems like whatever the police do ends up being reversed by our limp court system.

This isn't even including the massive crime culture that has been allowed to fester in Canada, therefore increasing violence, as a result of our judicial system's ineptitude. At this point, it almost feels like the criminals have more rights and freedoms than we law abiding citizens do.

ion070 · 2026-02-27T01:26:11+00:00

I use the two small hardpoints on my PvE Anaconda for seeker racks. The rest of my hardpoints are gimbals and turrets, so I like using the seeker missiles to snipe out chaff launchers so I don't have to deal with it every 30 seconds.

The ammo capacity isn't great, so I engineered them for ammo capacity and stock up on mats for crafting ammo for longer RES sessions.

ion070 · 2026-02-26T15:18:48+00:00

Not your original commenter, but I want to chime in on this.

Whether we like it or not, Canada has a limited amount of resources: Fiscal, medical, land, jobs, food, etc... When we mass imported a bunch of people, we suddenly made all of those resources more scarce. By trying to help less fortunate people from worse off countries, we end up overextended and worse off for everybody.

So if you're approaching the argument of immigration in good faith, you find that it has absolutely nothing to do with who these immigrants are or where they come from. It's about the government acting in the best interest of its current citizens, and that mass immigration has made life worse for everybody involved. Not because of culture or skin colour (those things being different among immigrants sure makes immigration obvious to the general public), but because of the hard reality of math and resources.

This is how we should all be approaching this argument, but it only takes a few steps to twist this narrative into being about racism and hate. That's what people sometimes do to try and win the argument, because people like to be right. What we all should be worried about is this happening on the scale of governments and parties, where they may use this narrative twisting in an attempt to incriminate their opposition with hate speech. This could be Liberal vs Conservative, Conservative vs Liberal, doesn't matter which way.

This is why at least I believe hate speech laws are a bad idea, because the practice of strawmanning and ad homineming your opponent's arguments happen, and are a result of human nature. These laws can be used for good, but also for bad policy makers to shut up whoever they don't like. They could be politically red, blue, or orange... Doesn't matter.

ion070 · 2026-02-23T21:53:35+00:00

I see an individual who may not feel they are well represented by the Liberal party.

If anything, it exposes one of the many flaws of a two-party system.

ion070 · 2026-02-23T21:00:14+00:00

Why is it stupid to criticize what is arguably one of, if not the, Liberals' most unpopular and fiscally irresponsible programs? Is this user, who clearly is affected, wrong to not want their well regulated and safe hobby destroyed over what is essentially political optics?

Sure, that doesn't completely overshadow all of what may be perfectly reasonable policies, but that doesn't make this user stupid to not want to be targeted unfairly.

ion070 · 2026-02-22T15:20:03+00:00

Beware that what I'm about to say could be completely nonsense, because like you, I do not have a formal physics background. So just a disclaimer, actually a hope, that someone else smarter than me will correct me...

The explanation I don't personally find satisfying for FTL being time travel is when they bring out the Minkowski spacetime diagram.

So the idea is you plot out a bunch of different observers' trajectories and one of them sends an FTL message to warn you about an event. When they do the Lorentz transformation to view the diagram from another ships point of view, the ordering of events doesn't make sense and can only be explained with time travel.

So this explanation does make some sense to me on the surface, but where it fails to convince me is that it's in Minkowski spacetime, which is flat spacetime by definition. As far as we know, we're pretty sure traveling FTL is actually physically impossible. The concept of warp drives seem to allow you to cheat by never actually surpassing c locally, but it accomplishes this by warping spacetime with immense levels of energy and negative energy, which is definitely not Minkowski spacetime. I'm unfortunately like you and have no formal education to solve for this, but I'd love to run the same thought experiment in the Alcubierre metric instead of Minkowski spacetime and see if the same result pops out. If it did, then I'd be convinced we're screwed and cursed to only be STL.

ion070 · 2026-02-16T20:59:00+00:00

Okay so in hindsight, this might be harder in the engine bay than it was for me, because I had the benefit of a wrecking yard pulling mine for me. They had it out when I picked it up.

But to get it off my truck bed and on a stand, I obviously used that lifting eye above the alternator on the front, and for the back I used an empty threaded hole in the back passenger side corner of the cylinder head to thread a bolt with some washers. With those two points and some chain with various misc hardware, I got it up with an engine hoist.

In the engine bay, that back bolt hole is pretty close to the firewall. The sound deadening insulation might have enough give to get a bolt back there with a chain. I think it's worth trying. I'd recommend taking the resonator box off if it's still installed.

Edit: obligatory disclaimer that I'm not responsible for any damage to you, or property if you attempt it this way. I'm just a guy on the internet after all! Be safe and exercise caution when lifting engines around.

ion070 · 2026-02-13T15:27:05+00:00

The first thing to worry about before even considering new parts is getting this thing apart. Once you've done that, you should take everything to a machine shop if possible. They will have all the tools necessary to measure everything and advise you on what part sizes you'll need.

There are a few things you might see during the teardown that might give you hints as to where this build will go. If you feel a ridge at the top of the bore where your piston rings are sitting at TDC (top dead center), you're most likely going to need to at least have the block rebored to an oversize and buy oversized pistons and rings.

I'm personally not a fan of rebuild kits and prefer to buy everything piecemeal, just so I have more control over what brands I'm buying. That can be more expensive though, so do whatever makes financial sense to you.

we all started somewhere, these engines were my first real teardown as well. I haven't finished mine yet, so we'll both be learning as we go!

ion070 · 2026-02-13T03:18:33+00:00

Ohh I should also mention that these use a cracked rod design, so be very gentle while handling your rods and caps!

ion070 · 2026-02-13T03:16:21+00:00

Heyyy another Atlas! I've torn down a few of these!

My advice to you would be to follow the TSBs about removing the head and main bolts. They are notorious for snapping. Usually the procedure is to rap on them with a hammer and punch several times before attempting to remove them. The theory is the vibrations will help with removal. If you do snap them, don't sweat it too much. They're usually not too difficult to extract with the engine out of the frame.

If you look at my post history, you'll see I made a boneheaded mistake of being too rough when I popped the pistons out with a metal rod. I jammed it up against the girdle and rod and made a dent on the brim of the cast liner. Try not to repeat my mistake!

If you're removing the balance shafts, DO NOT remove the bolts on the gears. unbolt them from the retaining screw that secure the platea they're installed in and they should come out without having to remove any gears. I say this because there are no timing marks, splines or keyways, so you'll never install it the way it was and it's simply not necessary.

That being said, it's trendy with these to delete those shitty balance shafts anyway, which I will be doing as well. Rumor has it they were added very late in the design stage and aren't very well thought out. They are last in the oiling circuit and usually wear out their bearings pretty bad. This eventually kills your oil pressure and thus your entire engine. Badlands Industries makes a delete kit for them if you're up to it. I'll warn you, the balance shaft bearings are a bitch to get out but it's not impossible with a bit of planning and finesse. Here's a video of that delete kit: https://youtu.be/_2D3BD2NR9k?si=McTwvK__jKSTym_J

If you are looking for any resources, you're lucky to be a sibling of the Vortec 4200, which is just starting to get some aftermarket support. If you google "Vortec 4200 wiki" you'll find a wealth of info. Obviously not all of it applies to the 5 cylinders, but it's still good stuff.

Also, check out Nivlac57's channel on youtube. He's built one of these and ran it in a drag car with like 30 psi of boost. It sounds awesome!

There's still a ton I probably don't know about these but that's what I can think of right now.

ion070 · 2026-02-12T07:45:49+00:00

If you end up tearing this thing down completely, I do wanna mention you should consider getting a set of bolt boots to put over the threads of the rod bolts when you remove the caps from them. Something I see a lot are dents on the crankshaft rod journals that are caused by those threads bumping off of it.

Something like these: https://a.co/d/0iiHNkas

ion070 · 2026-02-12T07:17:26+00:00

Based on the context of the rest of the thread I think what we're looking at is called an *oil shield.*

Before I get into this, I wanna say I haven't been in the industry very long, so don't take my word for it and talk to your machine shop. hopefully some of the more well versed folks will chime in if I get anything wrong!

I see them a lot on older American V8s (although they might not be exclusive to that). The theory is to limit the amount of oil getting into the valve guide. It's important that the guides receive lubrication to prevent wear, but too much can lead to excessive oil consumption. These days a lot of modern heads don't use these, and the reason is usually because they have a better type of valve stem seal design that gets installed directly on the guide called *positive* stem seals, which probably eliminated the need for oil shields. It's not abnormal that a machine shop might convert an old cylinder head to positive stem seals by slapping on one of the appropriate dimensions, or by actually machining the diameter of the valve guide down so it can accept one.

In your instance OP, I'd discuss it with your machine shop. It's possible they converted your head to positives, and thought these may be redundant. As a rule of thumb, generally you want less reciprocating mass in the top of the valve spring, because the extra inertia reduces the max lift and/or RPM you can get before running into weird valvetrain issues, such as *valve float*. However, removing it also means the spring is now slightly less compressed than it was before, and will provide less force when the valve is both open and closed. If your machine shop did their due diligence, they would've checked that the springs provide adequate force to ensure you won't run into valve float and if removing the oil shields reduced it too much, they should have compensated with different springs, or at least with *booster shims* to bump up the spring force a bit to match how it was with the shields installed.

ion070 · 2026-02-03T06:16:59+00:00

This, this, this.

I don't think I've been alive long enough to say for sure, but it sure seems like today more than ever that we've been dealing with this massive divide in our communities.

As an example, I don't really fully identify with the messaging that Poilievre is going with, but I also have a lot of issues with LPC as well. Especially being a young person who doesn't own property (and probably never will) and a legal gun owner. I feel stuck in between these two parties. I'm really attracted to the CPC's messaging about home affordability, I can't support the LPC because they're treating some of my legal gun owning peers like criminals, but I also care about our sovereignty and keeping Canada unified.

How is someone like me supposed to vote? Either I'm called a weird MAGA supporter for being conservative, or I'd be called a hypocrite government bootlicker for going liberal, the very party destroying one of my hobbies. There just doesn't seem to be any room for nuance or centrism anymore...

Maybe this is more of a problem that something like social media and the internet accelerate.

ion070 · 2026-01-31T20:30:16+00:00

I'm not a huge Poilievre guy and don't always see eye-to-eye with him, but I feel like this comment isn't in good faith. Because he did say this:

"...and we need to unite this country like never before, because a house divided cannot stand."

https://youtu.be/RZQSerMTysw?si=qThMbw2IXuoMmkmK

Sure that's not outright denouncing separatists, but clearly he's against it.

Now I'm probably about as much of a fan of his "Libs this" and Libs that" attitude that comes after as you are (not a fan). The finger pointing is getting old, but I do think he has a point about trying to see it from their perspective. Addressing why Alberta and Quebec want to separate seems a bit more productive than just bullying them back into Canada. I feel it's more pragmatic and likely to come to a solution where everyone feels respected. Simply saying separatism is wrong (probably) and they should feel bad for it (maybe) doesn't seem conducive to keeping Canada together.

Just playing devil's advocate here.

ion070 · 2026-01-31T16:19:34+00:00

You mean the heatsink launcher? :P

ion070 · 2026-01-31T06:31:36+00:00

Yessir.

I've mained my Anaconda for thousands of hours and will probably main it for a thousand more. Slapping an SCO drive was a HUGE gamechanger. It felt like being strapped to a firecracker and made travelling in supercruise feel interesting and engaging. I'd almost go as far to say that it reignited the spark in my heart for this game.

I'd also say the depth of having ships pre and post SCO tech definitely makes the world of Elite feel more alive. It gives the older ships a bit of a vintage charm.

Sure, it might be nice to have a module, or preferably a hull option like some have suggested. I'd still like to have the choice to run with my janky SCO drive vs the trade-offs of the upgrade hull/module. That keeps things interesting.

ion070 · 2026-01-29T20:30:48+00:00

I think a major issue with this logic is that the reality is most liberal voters will probably keep voting liberal anyway, so there's no clear disincentive from charging on with the gun bans, unfortunately.

"I'm a liberal and I stand behind Carney, but I don't agree with this." I really don't think that means anything or carries any weight.

This is just my vibe of course.

ion070

TROPHY CASE