Made a bit more progress today on the driver's side.  Made patch pieces for the crossbrace / front driver's seat mount out of some scrap 18 ga sheet I had laying around.

Pretty simple, but more difficult only because I have almost no metal working tools.  The only thing I added were dimple features to stiffen up the large open area of the sheet while simultaneously reducing the weight.  The larger holes were cut with a 2" hole saw, the smaller ones were a 1" hole saw.  I pulled the edges of the hole with needlenose pliers.  Pretty crude but with some patience it worked pretty well.  With the flanges and dimples these panels are incredibly stiff for their weight.

Welded up.

This is one of the underside.  I didn't cut the patch on the right large enough to incorporate the flange into it to join into the inner panel, so at a later time I cut a piece and welded it on for that purpose.  No pics of that though yet.

In etching primer.

Oh and what's this?  Hello there sweet thing, come around here often?

Block is back from the second shop.  He made the cylinder more round and gave me a bit more clearance, as the original hone job was on the tight side.  He also line honed the main journals and measured my clearances.  I ended up having to go with a Clevite-H 0.001" undersize main bearing to make my clearances tighter...cold they were at 0.0025-0.003" with the P's.  In an aluminum block those will grow to beyond 0.004" when it's up to temperature, which is terrible for oil pressure.  Right now I'm sitting at ~0.001-0.0015" cold with the -H's, so should be in the mid 0.002"s when hot.  Cherry.

Still lots of work to do, still lots of parts to buy.  Trying my best to take it a day at a time.