Sleeving barrels
 

Out of curiousity, is it possible to sleeve a cylinder barrel with a nickasil sleeve similar to what's possible with sleeving engine block cylinders?

I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish, but it's fairly easy to strip the nikasil and replate the cylinder, if repairs are needed or the cylinders are out of spec. What are you trying to do?

My cylinders are ausil, and when i did my top end not too long ago, i reglazed the cylinder walls and put new rings on the pistons. 1.4k miles later and i have less than 10% leakdown on all 6 cylinders stone cold. But i was curious if anyone presses sleeves into barrels similar to pressing sleeves in normal engine blocks. Because if i ever junk my barrels i can pull them out and use my ausil barrels as a donor for some sleeving.

I've taken the alusils and nikasil plated them. Much better solution than pushing a iron sleeve into the cylinder, as you loose quite a bit in the area of thermal capacity and thermal conductivity, as cast iron has about 1/4 that of aluminum.

Right well i'm not suggesting pressing a steel sleeve. But i've talked to a machiner before who mentioned that the new thing with circle track racers is using 'nicky' sleeves when sleeving there cylinders instead of the steel sleeves that they are replacing.
When you plate ausil's with nikasil are the results good? Or i should say are they at least up to par with something that originally was nikasil?

Well, I've seen that too- they can take the iron liner or an aluminum sleeve for that matter and nikasil it for the friction reduction, among other things. The results with plating the alusil cylinders is about equal to that of redoing the orignal nikasil ones- I would never expect the same life span the second time around out of the replates though. I tend to like to use cylinders that are otherwise in spec and don't have excessive wear, etc, if I'm redoing cylinders. You never know what they've gone through. For example, if the cylinder has been overheated, it will have become soft and won't be anywhere as strong as what it originally was.