Back in the day when I worked at a rebuilder (I sat at the counter, was not actually machining anything) we would do align honing. Wes has the right idea. A very small amount of material gets removed from the main caps and then reassembled. A honing bar was fed through all of the main journals together and the bores were realigned back to a factory spec.
I have no idea what type (brand) of machine it was that we had. I do know that the blocks were mounted upside down and I believe that the machine would apply upward pressure to the honing bar as to bias the removal of material on the main caps, although I am not 100 percent on that. There is a limit on what can be repaired and for what reason. Most align hone jobs were done on blocks that were severely overheated or baked and the block actually twisted. More often than not the crank would move less than .002 after the hone.
I can tell you that anything American made from the 90's or earlier was not expected to be extremely precise. For example, rod journals on a 2.8 gm v6 had an acceptable tolerance a mile wide. Something like .0015 to .0050 was "in spec".
.002 change in crank position is well within mass production allowance for the era.
Many blocks wouldn't even have cylinder bores square with the deck.
Factory mass produced American engines were terrible back in day.
