I've thought about flex honing, but I don't know if I can trust that will keep cylinders cylindrical. This would be where machine shops come in for me.

Thanks for chiming in. You gave us a good reminder to always be careful. Keep us posted once your car us running again.

balancing everything, making sure all the holes are round and where they should be, and that tolerances are all within spec is a lot of work and requires some special tools and equipment. If things aren't right then you gotta bust out even more tools and equipment to fix things. Most shops don't have everything under one roof, so they have to send work out. This then complicates the process and makes it take even longer. You can't really just slap parts you ordered together because everything needs to be balanced, and for what ever reason things don't usually fit together right out of the box, they usually need machining. So find a place that specializes in your motor and send it to them, thats usually the path that leads to a good end result.

They leak because you broke the piston which means that the ring isn't supported in one place so it leaks.

As far as honing.......to fix it, honing isn't required.
A flex hone is worse than no hone.

Piston and rod out.
Remove rings.

Fit same rings to second hand replacement piston / rod.
Fit piston/ rod assembly.

Job done.
But that's only if you fix it straight away.

Keeping on driving a broken engine is really dumb because they get more and more and more broken.

What does that mean? Replace with used pistons and rods? Or upgraded pistons and rods? What company makes better rings than OEM?

Talking here about fixing the problem not making the engine stronger.

They never break because they're not strong enough, they break because they weren't tuned right.


It's the tune that needs fixing then a stock engine with stock parts works well to make lots of power.





It's really just the mental aspect here where every ricer refuses to accept the fact that they broke it because they got the tune wrong.
It's easier to think that it just wasn't strong enough in the first place and so needs rebuilding so it's stronger.
But it'll break again due to the bad tune that broke it in he first place.

I agree that just replacing rings is cheapest fix, but if you are going to change the rings, shouldn't you go ahead and upgrade at least the rods to handle more torque (instead if retarding the timing to limit torque to 400 ft-lbs and wasting that power?).

And upgraded pistons can help protect the rings better by keeping the air/fuel mixture in center of combustion chamber? Labor is same to only replace rings as it is to upgrade rods and pistons. Yes, cost for upgraded parts is a LOT more.

A piston / rod change can be done with engine in place by just removing the head and sump. No machining required.Very little expense too.

I've done it of course and reused all the other parts, headgasket included.

Why would you want to complicate things for no gain and lots of extra cost?

It's all labor. It makes sense to do this to keep engine running at least amount of cost.
Just replace the 4 sets of rings and get it back on the road.

Why replace rings when they're not faulty?

You don't think it's worth replacing the other 3 so they all have full thickness? What if another is worn too? I wouldn't want to open up everything again in a few years.

It's not the rings that break, it's the "ringlands".


Try googling it, you'll learn something.


The rings themselves usually aren't worn.
If you want to know how much they ARE worn, take the ring off the piston, put it square in the bore and measure the ring gap, compare that to the factory spec. That will give a total wear measurement of bore + ring.
Then if you move the ring up so it's above where the top ring normally gets to, measure the gap again, that's the ring wear minus bore wear. The difference between the two measurements divided by pi, that's the bore wear.

Pistons go up and down, but the rods rotate around crank. The pistons have to stay in cylinder so the rings have to put enough pressure to stay in position. Only 3 thin rings per piston and top ring will wear on opposite side as bottom ring to counteract the forces of rod, which is at different angles as rods go around the crank. I just don't see no wear. The more powerful the combustion, the greater the forces the rings need to overcome to keep pistons in position. I'll keep looking for research or tests to better understand.

Try this.