Glad to see success! Yep, the antifreeze trick is one of the best, the only thing is that there are health hazards to it. The enviromentally friendly stuff don't work, so you have to go with the poisonous green stuff. Just keep your head off the fumes. The best way to do it is just trust the time factor of 24 hours or so, and zip in to shut it off and let it cool so there's no more steam when you pop the lid. You can always throw it back in if you feel it needs it after scrubbing a bit.
It doesn't brighten brass like flywheels and such, but it sure gets the crud off to have an easy time dunking in gun cleaner or straight to buffing for them kind of parts. The crock pot kills old castor in its tracks pretty good. Still has a hard time getting past carbon deposits though, but gun cleaner eats through that if left long enough. It's good there are not very many parts to worry about in that department though.
About the con rod clearance, your probably going to find more now that it is cleaned. Two grand clearance isn't excessive...I've felt rods that were pretty dang loose before and still ran OK. I would pick up a spare rod, wrist pin and safety keeper clips, and after you run in your new bearings and re-seat the piston and you have the carb tuned, go ahead and slip in the new parts and you should be good to go. A good idea also is run some castor oil with your mix if your not running some already just to get it past the rebuild so it adds some cushion while everything re-seats, but remember my ideas aren't gospel, so others might have different thoughts on that.
There are methods of taking up a little room on an old rod, but theres risk of it loosing its bushing when run. The trick there is using a small punch with a VERY gradual taper, almost pin sharp and dotting a few peen marks at the lower right hand side of the diameter into the rod knuckle....directly opposite from where the bushing does all its work. If you go with too blunt of a punch, the peen only is "surface" expanded at the outer lip of the bushing...the center will still be large....trick is to go deep with the distortion.
