Different size cylinders in a 1930's Plymouth?

[woodchuckie]

I finally got around to reading some letters I brought home from my mother's house after she died a year ago last Thanksgiving. The letters and receipts were mostly from my uncle to his mother (my grandmother) when he was in the Marines from 1940 through the end of the war. He was 28 years old and was a mechanic in the Marines and finished his working career as a mechanic at a Ford dealership after the war.
In one of his letters he was advising his mother on what needed to be done to fix the car she bought. I'm guessing it was a 1930's Plymouth. He told her to have new rings put on among other things. He said " Those people at Plymouth put a standard size piston in their cars and might put an undersized and an oversize piston with it in the same motor so you might end up with three different size pistons in the same motor. You can have J.V. check that for you." Have any of you ever heard of this.

Other things of interest I found going through these things were:
ration coupon books
power bills for two or three dollars.
Their house mortgaged for taxes with uncle helping pay it off with ten dollars a month.
They were paid not to grow cotton.
received disaster relief funds because of a tornado.
The tax bills I saw were for less than twenty dollars, probably on 60 acres.
borrowed money from local bank with two milk cows as collateral.
One daughter mentioned in a will (Before Civil War) had incurred some dis-favor from her father an received a cow in the will.
In the same will, one received a yellow girl named Belle.

 

[art]

Days ago quality control wasn't what it is today and you might find things a little different but not to say that you would have one cylinder std and one ten over. They have enough problem getting a V cofigured block to have both head locations the same distance from the crank center line. I've only seen what you talk about done in machine shops while doing partial rebuilds and is not something that is common. Most times it's done for monetary reasons. Birdy projects!

 

[Egon]

Those would have been an L Head six engine.

 

[CurlyDave]

In the early 70s I had a mechanic offer to rebuild the V-8 engine from a Dodge van. One cylinder was in worse shape than the other 7 and he said he would overbore only that one and use a larger piston in there.

I opted to buy a used engine from a wrecked car with only about 10,000 miles on it for a lower price than the rebuild.

Years later, I sold it to a friend, and he drove it for several more years. That used engine had over 150k miles and was still going the last time I saw him.

 

[KentT]

I've heard that story in regard to the rebuilt engines that you used to be able to buy from Sears years ago. I've heard that Sears would hone the cylinders and knurl the pistons to tighten the tolerances back up, rather than put a new set of pistons in, and if that didn't work, they'd often go .010 over on just the bad cylinder...

 

[Bigbubbasdad]

Pistons in the auto industry were sized individually until the 1980's. At GM, we had 5 classes of piston / bore fits, labeled A thru E. Standardization was phased in over a couple of years. 1st was to same size on each engine, so you don't have different sizes on the same engine. The next was to cut the # of classes to 1.