[tomj76]

So, I have dropped the oil pan and removed the rod caps to inspect the bearings and journals... there definitely are issues here. The three bad cylinders have rod bearings that were spun in the rod big ends, two were "welded" to the rods. I measured the diameter of the scored crankshaft journals and see a bit of wear ~0.001", but the journals definitely need to be polished. The main bearings look good and measurements with Plastigauge show minimum wear (even at 240,000 mi). I'm tempted to try to clean up the crankshaft journals with the shoestring & sandpaper method rather than removing the whole thing to "do it right". However I think the rods need to be cleaned up too, so the head will need to come back off, which leaves only a bit more work to pull the block out as well.

Anyone ever try the shoestring approach to polishing a rod journal on a crankshaft? What kind of results did you get?