I'm with Jerry on the ws wiper stainless steel piece and the condition of the bearings, but I have been surprised so I'll add something about that in a minute. I've seen that ws wiper trick done since I was in high school and it usually does help. Measure the length on the bottom cap, cut the stainless piece to fit, bevel one end and slightly radius the edges (forming the top side) and tap it in slowly. If you drop the pan and find you have a rope seal and are tempted to swap to a rubber/neoprene/viton blend rear main seal, please make sure you rotate your crankshaft 360 degrees while wiping & inspecting the surface very well. Any roughness, pitting, etc will chew the rubber seal up pronto. If you see any pitting, etc and want to change things, my suggestion would be to buy the new rubber seal and the proper Speedi-Sleeve for the rear of the crank. Drop the crank, install the sleeve using some red loctite and let that be your nice new surface.
If you check the bearing tolerances with Plasti-Gage (which isn't perfect but is reasonably accurate) and you get an unwanted surprise...say for example something like .006" or .007" (which I don't expect but is possible)...you do have the option of using some .0025" or .003" shim stock material and very carefully (using 220 or 240 grit wet/dry paper on a piece of glass) remove just a wee bit from the ends of each bearing half...and please let me repeat: just a wee bit because .0025" is just a hair more than half the thickness of a piece of common copy paper. As long as you remember you have to shim both upper & lower by the same amount (1/2 of the total...in my example .005"/2=.0025" to get you back to a really nice .001" clearance or .006"/2=.003"). The last time I did this I cleaned each bearing half really well and set each upright on the piece of glass and measured before/after at the apex of the curve and stopped when I could see I had sanded off the amount I was shimming by. It didn't take long, either. You can find stainless steel shim stock on Amazon in thicknesses as small as .0007". That way you won't have to do new bearings at this point in time. There is a shim material made thicker in the center and thinner on each end but that's different. It was designed to be used if you were only going to shim one bearing half (the idea being if you had a tolerance of .007" the shim at the center would be .007" thick and on each side would be .0035" thick so it would balance out...sort of. If you're shimming both, you want it equal all the way around. Good luck.
