I have decided that the place to start is the engine. 

First off, let me tell you that if you don't have a 1/2" cordless impact, you NEED to get one.  This jobbie was $225 on sale at Harbor Freight.  It performs as well as tools that cost three times as much.

When I took off the head, it looked good, and the pistons don't show any real signs of wear or skirt slap.

Everything will be cataloged, bagged, and stored in separate bins, but here is the whole inventory after initial teardown of the block.

Jiggling things around, I found that cylinder number one was rattling around at the crank end of the con-rod.  Removing just that piston from number one revealed spun bearings, and a scored crank.  The surprise is that while there is scoring, it is not deep and there must still have been good oil feed, because there is no discoloration.

The bearing is all beat up too.  The coating is gone, and pieces are chipped off.

This is what the conrod big end looks like.  It also shows no bluing, but I am not a fan of machining conrods. 

My plan is to pull the crank, and take it to an excellent machine shop we have here in town.  I will rely on their feedback as to whether we can save my crank, or if a replacement is the way to go.  Either way, I think I see H-beam conrods with ARP hardware in my future, because I plan to make this a boosted engine build.  If all the pistons look good (which I expect they should), my plan is to ceramicoat them, but a forged set of JE's sure is tempting.

One last thing, that aforementioned well known shop also did this.  What you see is the rear oil seal carrier with one 10mm head bolt (M6X16) as original, but also a 13mm head bolt of unknown size stuffed in on the right. 

So it looks like the shop mechanic stripped the hole out on the rear seal cover, and "fixed" it by cramming in a larger bolt.  This kind of thing is why I prefer to do everything myself.  I don't need to pay someone to break my stuff.  I can break it just fine on my own, for FREE.  At any rate, this is where we stand today.