[crustysarge]

I am just thinking about the many stories I read where main dowels have dropped out. What about a drop of bearing race retaining compound on them? Not like you pull them all the time. Seems to me it could not hurt.

[steve25]

Once things have gone amuck to the point where the dowels are getting kicked around enough to start to fall out , retaining compound will not help out to curtail that process!

If anything drilling through the bulk head wall, then into the dowel maybe half way in order to drive in a pin would be the way to go about it.

[shermanator2]

Are your dowel pins the original 0.3095" diameter? If so, this guy http://www.precisionautomotivespecialists.com sells extra long ones that might press in better. I think that a lot of builders ream the holes out to something like 0.3120 and press in generic 0.3125 dowel pins that are available in many lengths from many places at very low prices. You would then need to also ream the caps to .3125, so you need two reamers.

It seems like captivating them from the cap side would be less invasive than what steve25 suggested. Maybe just put a dab of JB Weld on each hole and then the dowel cannot fall out. Seems ghetto, but it might work fine.

[Half-Inch Stud]

What Steve said.

To sleep better at night, Put a stop into the Main Caps any way you choose.

...never lost a Main Dowel, so i sleep well doing nothing aboutdit

[steve25]

The fact of the matter here is gang that if your making enough power to kick around the main caps and main web area of the block ,or if your tune is so far off to be detonating and kicking things around, then you have a failing Bearing issues taking place to some degree already!

In the case of the above if you have the factory caps, and if the rpm is high enough then something big is going to give up the Ghost weather the dowel pin is there or not!