MCW
Somebody's talking crap here & it ain't the tree!
Hi mate.
The main issues I encountered was simply a lack of quality control from the manufacturer, not the supplier. The good kits were excellent, but probably 50% had issues with somebody doing the bevelling and getting excited - damaging the Nikasil up the bore plus one kit had some imperfections in the bore. Also the supplied rings were absolute garbage and hooked a few ports snapping the tops out of pistons. The faulty kids were replaced free of charge however and I now supply Caber rings with these kits. The important thing to note with the 372 BB kits I've had is that all but one kit was unsaleable due to imperfections - all the rest were unsaleable due to human error while bevelling.
Al and Will along with myself tested these kits for about 6 months and while the good kits were excellent, a 50% replacement rate due to faults was unacceptable. No kits that have been sold to customers on eBay etc have had an issue as all of the bugs were sorted out prior to me starting to sell them.
Most of the kits without a base gasket have been around 170psi compression with the Caber rings but funnily enough only around 155-160psi with the cheap supplied rings - Cabers are definately worth the $12 odd from our little Greek mate on eBay. He's excellent to deal with.
All in all with the kits I've been importing I've been very happy but have realised that every kit has to be unpacked and checked just to be sure prior to sale - a couple of minutes per kit is all it takes and any imperfect kits can be weeded out before reaching the customer. The biggest issue I've had is our Postal Service busting rings - even through umpteen layers of bubble wrap. How they do it is beyond me so I'm now inserting all pistons with rings fitted in the bore prior to posting them - it's the only way to be sure that those peanuts won't wreck something.
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