He ended up tearing everything down, measure, re-measuring, and verifying that the crank was not bent. Finally he solved it. I had two bearing caps mixed up. One cap has a chamfered edge to accomodate the center crank bearing with integrated thrust bearings on the sides. I had an end cap on the center and without that chamfered edge, it was putting pressure on the far edges of the bearing and squeezing it tight to the crank. I should have realized this when I plastigauged the bearings and found the clearance was tighter toward the ouside. Duh. Its so obvious now that it was user error.

In my defense, the numbers on the bearing caps are really worn down but are numbers 2, 3, and 4. There is no 1, probably because it got cut off when Ford took a V6 and make it a V4. I had put 3 on the outside, not realizing that my #4 was actually a #1 even though it was so worn it was not legible. Lesson learned. At least I didn't make things worse and instead went to a pro. With the crank turning freely, I could get back to the rest of the reassembly...

End of crank rant>

I installed new balance shaft bearings and was very sad to see that the balance shaft was very hard to turn once installed. I double and tripple checked that the bearings were straight which they were. Ultimately I had to use some sand paper on my bearing installer tool to take a tiny amount off the I.D. of both bearings. Now the balance shaft bearing turns easily by hand like it should.

Another gotcha with reassembling the motor is the gaskets. The gaskets aren't super precise. In some cases, these metal lined gasket stick out slightly and need to be cut down or bent over. A good example is intake manifold gasket, which stick out slightly onto the valve cover sealing surface. The gasket has metal in the middle, so the only way to ensure you don't end up with oil leaking out the valve cover is to tap the gasket sitting proud with a mallet to get it to sit flat. Another example is the intake manifold gasket to the heads. My heads have enlarged intake ports. The gasket therefore blocks a portion of the enlarged intake port. I had to use a dremel grinder to cut the gasket back. Ugh. That's annoying but it comes with making engine modifications.

The final issue I ran into was one I never experience with any of my prior rebuilds on this motor: The engine was leaking oil out the balance shaft pully. It wasn't "leaking" per se. Instead, it was releasing a fine mist of oil. After some troubleshooting with the engine running, I figured out that oil was escaping between the pully and the woodruff key'ed shaft it sits on. That's wild. I removed the pully, put some sealing compound on the pully and the shaft, reinstalled, let it sit for the 24 hour cure time, started it up and no more leak. I have never seen oil coming out that spot before. The manual makes no mention of sealing there. And yet I see no reason oil wouldn't leak there since its exposed to the full oil pressure that the balance shaft bearing is getting. The probably isn't an issue when you are running 30 psi of oil pressure stock. I have a high pressure oil pump in there that runs about 65 psi when at tempareture (75 psi when cold). I guess that makes the diffference. Anyways, at the cost of having to drain the cooling system and remove the radiator again, the pully is sealed now and the leak is gone.