How your day can go from good to bad to ugly in a few hours....

[RobH]

Well, it doesn't look normal to ME, but you have to consider that I've only been in the hobby since March. Maybe heat marks like that are normal in some cases. It should still work I think. Nothing is broken obviously. Get a set of the odd-sized head screws and put it back together.

I checked www.mcmaster.com and you're right M3.5 is crazy hard to find. The RB WS7 screws are the same, if you can find that set. I think Hyper set is more common as you'd have to import screws for France for the RB's and that's just silly.

-Rob

This is a kind of silly idea, but you could drill and tap M4 threads into the case and enlarge the screw holes in the head. You'd have to have big ones to drill and tap your case though. If you had the curage to do it, you could then use 4x14mm screws. *shrug*

 

[mcvickj]

I ended up finding the screws at a LHS that I normally don't go to becuase their service sucks. But that is a different story.

The only difference is the screws are an M3.5x15 instead of 14. Since these were the only screws I could find in Grand Rapids I bought em. I got home and reassembled the engine and it looks like it is good to go. The extra mm did not hurt. The head is nice and snug. Also using a very fine paintbrush I used a small dab of anti-sease compound on the bottom of the screw heads.

What I found really strange about these screws are even though they are metric the head is SAE. I ended up having to use a 7/64 allen wrench with a pair of visegrips to snug everything down.

ImBroken - Even though I have things back together I would still like to hear back from you.