I use a three stone hone. and have someone with a dish liquid bottle squirting diesel fuel into the cyl when im honing. I don't worry about crosshatch . All I want is to break the glaze enough to make the new rings seat. Now a ring bearing and valve lap job is not a rebuild. Its a overhaul. And many times its not a Band aid repair or a patch job. If the cyl wear is acceptable. the ring lands not worn. the crank in good cond . and valve guides not worn its the proper repair. Right now I got a 75000 mile 428 ford engine. I tore it down to inspect the condition. Its not worn. No ring ridge. Valves all good. not dirty inside. I would be taking a big chance letting some machine shop even touch it. Nope it will get new rings. rod bearings, possibly main bearings, a new timing chain & oil pump. and lap the valves. And it will be better than any machine shop rebuilt engine . Because its stock bore and not a turned crank. and nobody ground the valves thin so they could burn. My OT 71 truck the big block 402 went down because some one before me let a machine shop work on it. They installed hard seats in the heads. and one of those seats came loose popped the head off the valve. big hole in the cyl head, bent rod, cracked piston and busted cyl wall.. You don't need hard seats. All you need is hard valves. with a three angle cut. The old LP engines never had hard seats. Just stainless steel exhaust valves with rotators. and they almost never wore out.
Use an 80 grit stones and it comes out pretty fast. When I bore a engine I leave it .003 under and use a 80 grit to get close then use a 280 to finish
See, why I asked What the internet told me was you need to crosshatch to suspend the oil and lube the rings, what the internet said was you have to go past the dull look, and keep going till shiny. Now 40 years ago I never gave it thought...but at my age I don't want to be pulling the engine again in a few years if it starts to puff. Heck, I don't like mowing the lawn
In the 50s and 60s I only used a 3 stone hone. All I had. As the man said, it ain't rocket science. Ben
I don't mow my lawn. I let the cows and sheep graze it down. And the grandsons keep a good part of it tromped down to bare dirt. All I can say is ive did a whole lot of rering jobs and never had any problems except one time when a rod bolt broke. There where a lot of naysayers predicting certain catastrophic failure with the Ring Job squirrel did on the Hudson. Ant it still used oil but made the Lemons race and came in first.
Back in the Day there was a guy Named Tom McCawhill. He was a expert in I think Mechanix illustrated. He claimed when he first started out they used 36 grit sandpaper to remove the glaze. and Chrome rings would always seat.
***mins engine, recommends not deglazing, just stick the pistons in there! Or at least back 15 years or so ago, they did. Bones
That's good info my old friend. I hate to admit it but I like learning something new. @Ryan I some how managed to miss the real drama. Sorry you had to clean it up, I am going to guess/hope that I have not caused any. That ignore feature you put in the new interface is great once you manage to make the list large enough.
We pretty much all have. I do not think I know anyone who has worked in any type of shop be it weld shop to machine shop and anything else I have missed that have not used the facilities at one time or another. Funny thing in '03 I left the Star to be disabled (and become a semi permanent fixture here). A year after I left the Machine Shop manager called me on the phone and said, 'I know that you are not supposed to do manual labor for a living anymore but I doubt that you have stopped playing with old cars. I cannot give you an official p*** but if you need to use the shop you can slide in on 3rd shift and slip back out before sun up." That is just the blue collar at***ude I think.
I know several people who don't believe in honing and removing the glaze. There the same guys who pour Bon Ami, cleanser and air cleaner dust ect. down the carb attempting to get the rings to seat.
I know it sounds crazy, but around 1995 or so I had to work on a ***mins triple nickel and contacted ***mins for recommendations on breaking the glaze/honing and they told me at that time they didn’t recommend any honing! I had always honed an gas engine, but had not done a lot of diesels. So I followed their recommendations and the engine ran fine! Bones
The first shop I work at out of teck school, I did a rering job on a 350 chevy and the boss wouldn't let my hone the cylinders, needless to say it came back. Boss still wouldn't let me hone it, so it got a set of cast iron rings and they sealed it up.
Cylinder on the left way honed with the dingle ball hone, the one on the right with a flex hone. You can see the ring wear grooves show up as the dark shades. These cylinders have between .013 to .018 ring wear.
All I can say is that thousands of engines have been put together with less than optimal tools used to recondition them. Many had acceptable results and many others didn't. Probably the biggest reason for success or failure is the condition of the engine they started with. You can spend your money for parts and install them and hope that you are one of the lucky ones that ends up with a decent result. Its really all about whether you want to take a chance on succeeding by performing marginal methods, or want to take additional steps and try to insure a better chance of success. You made no mention of performing any type of valve or valve guide work or even insuring the heads are flat after blowing a head gasket. While you have the engine apart, its a good time to have it cleaned and get the oil p***ages nice and clean too. To me, while the engine is out and apart, why not do the things that give the best chance of success? There are a lot of things posted here that are questionable. All machining requires precision in order to obtain the best results. If you are doing any type of machining that employs tools which are not professional quality machine tools, your results ARE going to vary. For myself, life has taught me that every time I try to take a shortcut, I end up paying for it later on. Good Luck whatever you decide to do.
Do you plan to re***emble this engine as it looks in the picture? Do you mean the cylinders are .013/.018 oversize ? Is that top to bottom or just different cylinders? Are you planning to reuse the original pistons ?
I agree...FWIW I had a set of heads I'd ported years ago, sent them in for the works, guides checked (they were fine), new valves, springs, seals and surfaced. I'd mentioned it before I think, but main reason to pull the block after I got the heads off was all the gunk I saw in the coolant p***ages, so it'll go into the shop to be cleaned and new cam bearings put in. She'll be freshened up well and done the best I can in the garage, but to be honest if the car needed to be back on the road ASAP, it would have just been a head gasket job. But luckily?? I had another car I could get going for her while I spend time on this one.
Top to bottom wear, the most at the top of the ring travel. The piston top ring groove is worn beyond limits. And no, I would never ***emble an engine that looks like this. It was hopes to just pull off a ring job, but that's not happening. This block will take a trip to a machine shop for cleaning and bore job for new pistons.
James , that shows just what I was saying on a previous post. That’s what makes the bead hone so popular, it makes a bad cylinder “ look” great in no time at all. The stone hone will “ bridge “ the low spots and hone only the high spots, leaving a poor looking hone pattern. The cylinder walls on a used engine will be “ wavy “ . The stone hone will , in a small way take a little of that waviness out..... if you have time. Lol Bones
All machining requires precision in order to obtain the best results. That is a fact that is not in dispute. and in my part of the world the machinist doing the work most likely isn't all that good. They learned at the Vo tech. From a Instructor who needed a job. because no employer who's employees must make him money for him to stay solvent would hire him. I was quoted $450 to just bore a small block chevy. Asked if they used a block plate and all I got was dumb looks. Naw I will continue to gamble on a $100 rering kit. The 307 that's in my 57 chev dump truck. Was raan in a stock car all season without a air filter. ran very good. smoked like the proverbal tire kill. I tore it down and the rings where thin. the ring ridge excessive. I got .020 rings. set them in the bottom of that respective ring travel and filed them to fit. Runs good no smoke. has plenty of vacuum for the brake booster. That truck cost me $85. I might use it a few times per year. No point in putting a high dollar engine in it. I only fixed it because I rented it to a construction company. They used it off highway to move materials around the job. single axle truck got around good. I had the rear axle locked in low range. and the throttle where it would only open part way. No point in spending mega bucks on a 307.
Back in my working days, I always had a 350 Chevy ready to go in my shop! People though that was odd, as I was a Ford man! But the little Chevy, was plentiful and cheap to build. If the cylinder needed boring, I would just get another block. I would hone the cylinders, re ring it, new bearings, take the heads apart, check and clean and lap the valves. Put new seals on , ***embly the engine and wait for a customer! Sold a ton of them. They all ran just fine. I told the customer the “ condition “ of the engine before he bought it. That was, how much taper the cylinders had etc. I picked the 350 Chevy because it fit 1/2 the cars on the road at that time and they seem to like that “ rebuild”! Lol Bones
As you can see here, the top ring land fails the ring go no go gauge. The top ring land is the one that generally takes all the wear. Top ring land, you can see that the gauge goes all the way into the ring land. This is in the second ring land, you can see that the gauge just starts into the ring land meaning that this ring land is still good.
I fully agree with you. However I wonder how much if any of that waviness if any will disappear when the head is torqued down? and if they bore a engine without a block plate torqued on. Will those "perfect" bores still be round and "perfect" when the head is installed? My cat D4 7U has a oppesed two cyl horizontal gas starting pony engine. crude engine . no oil pump. doesn't even have cam bearings . Just the cam in the cast block. and the cyls are extremely egg shaped. No way to cut oversized rings to fit. and its already been bored .020. New rings didn't help one bit. So it gets a mix of 50 weight oil and some kind of motor honey. It has little pet****s at the bottom of the bore on each cyl head. you open them and crank it over a bit to remove the seeped oil from the bore before starting it up. However that pony engine only runs for at most 15 minutes at a time. I have a real good spare pony engine . I got it from a old road grader at the s****yard.however its not worth the effort to swap them out.
cut the ring land wider and install a spacer. I use one of the used steel oil rings from the dis***embly. its wore thin enough it will not touch the cyl walls. clock it 180 drgrees and you got a gapless top ring!
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