Turbo II Rod Bushings in 81-85 rods

[Kraazy_Cooter]

I read in the dodge garage about how the 81-85 rods are the same top end as the turbo II rods, so, I bought the rod bushings to put in the top of my 81-85 rods. I was wondering if there is enough beef left for strength once the bushings are in? I have in previous cheaper engines honed the small end of the LW rods and used a floating pin w/o any bushings and they are still functioning; I thought about doing that again to give the most strength to the rod. Any thoughts?

[86Tona]

Since the small ends are the same is there a reason to put the bushings in at all? Couldn't you just press in the pins?

I asked both of these questions and discovered that for me the T2 rods would be the best bet. I had to change the pistons to the T2 pistons when rebuilding my '86 2.2. I found that there is a different between the pistons that use the press fit pin and the ones that use the floating pin. The difference is in how the piston's pivot point gets oiling. This bothered me enough that I decided to use the T2 pistons with new bushings and the oiling hole in the end 'mod'.

[turbovanman]

According to the Mopar book, the older rods don't have alot of meat so when you bore them out for the bushings, you weaken them. Either buy T2 rods or use them as is,

[DirectConnection]

You really don't need the floating pin setup anyways. I think it's better, but we have a contract at work for the PASS and ACT tour and they use sealed crate engines (only we can work on them) and they are ZZ4 Chevy SB's that use pressed pin setups.


All the high dollar setups use floating pins... but i doubt you'd see any difference.

Besides possibly weakening the small end (which I doubt) the biggest concern is rod alignment. You MUST use a proper setup when boring and honing the rod's small end. If the bushing is not dead nuts to the rod's big end, you will have severe piston scuffing, rod sideloading, and worse...rod bearing failure. It doesn't take much to make the piston cocked in the bore. Your pin clearance is probably about .0007" to the rod and .0005" in the piston. You have a few thousandths in rod bearing oil clearance to help pick up some slack... but if you're basically just .001" out of square to the rod's housing bore, then you are more than likely .003 across the pin. This is magnified even more by the piston being cocked which you want running up and down square to the bore for better sealing (and wear) not to mention the rod bearing displacing the load evenly on a square rod journal.