A customer of our shop has a 64 vette convertible, he has restored it by himself. with one exception, the motor.
He "ordered" a numbers matching 327 from 1100 miles away. Never seeing it until he gets it 1 year later.

He gets it, puts it in, bothers us endlessly for free advice (we should be charging him). The first time, it immediately blows coolant out the tailpipes on startup, won't run worth a crap.
He pulls it, ships it back, they supposedly go thru it again, put a new cam in it (?), say there's no coolant going thru motor, even when you see green in the intake ports.

The motor comes back, he reinstalls it, manages to drive it to our shop, it knocks (you've never heard piston slap until you've heard this one!), smokes blue, then steam out the right bank. It starts to misfire and then dies as he returns home. so, out it comes again.

This time he asks us to tear it down (he'd been sending it with intake on engine, the guy wouldn't let him inside it)
Pull pan, full of metal, and grit, pull intake, 2 of the hogged out ports are full of coolant. Pull right head, number 4 piston has about 1 1/4 inches rock in bore.
The final icing on this cake, the whole motor (all 8) have been sleeved, with no honing and the pistons can be removed/installed without a ring compressor. The sleeves were put in such oversize bores you can see the water jackets throught the thin upper part of the sleeves. The bottoms were trimmed off with a die grinder right into where the skirts travel. the rods were numbered on removal and put into the wrong cylinders. And what I thought was the worst, was the wrist pins were removed/installed with an acetylene torch, I have never seen rods so discolored from heat before.

We all think he's really dumb (being nice), as he's stil trying to deal with this fool, and thinks he's going to get something out of this.

Thanks to the almighty for people like Sal, JDM and and others, who have proven reputations, so we can get stuff that's real quality.