[A26B]

I just spoke with Chris Allen who was the man in charge of design & supervision of the LT5 assembly line at Mercury.

Chris said "to the best of my recollection, for the first year, dealers were not allowed to open an LT5 engine. He went on to say "I only recall one engine that was ever returned to Mercury. We opened it up and the only thing wrong with it was carbon buildup. We cleaned it up & sent it back to the dealer with no other work."

Chris also said that Mercury did not have any procedure for rebuilding LT5 engines and that he would have known about it if they did.

Apart from engineering development & test units, there appeared to be a couple of warranty replacement engines in the group of 30 engines I had that were remaining from the lot of engines GM sold off 2 or 3 years before I got them. As I understand it, what actually happened was that dealers did not rebuild LT5's. The dealer received authorization and was shipped a new crate engine from GM stock (not Mercury). The dealership returned the original engine to GM, in the same crate the new one was shipped in, where upon receipt, it was simply placed in a storage warehouse with all of these other test & development engines. The warrany replacement engines were never rebuilt as the cost to GM would have been greater than the cost of a new crate engine.

I probably have some photos of the engines I think were returned & recall some instructions to the dealer about what all to remove & return to GM. Those crates were different than the crates I've seen for crate engines offered for sale.

It seems probable to me that procedures & policies perceived to be feasible when written may have turned out in actual practice to not be practical.