In reply to mck1117:
That's true but the mix of drill speed and plunge speed you need to hit leaves a LOT of room for doing it wrong. Plus when you get it back from a machine shop it SHOULD be appropriately cleaned of all the invisibly small debris that honing creates. You can't see the stuff but if you don't get it all out you're shooting yourself in the foot. I would say if a shop will hone the thing for less than twice the cost of the ball hone (usually $50 iirc?) it's money well spent. Assuming the shop doesn't suck. 
As far as the rings thing, I'm actually not on board with 'new rings always' and here's why. I have heard some horror stories about new ring sets with too much tension to the walls wrecking engines, and i have an engine that has stock cast pistons in it right now (one of which i think i broke, sigh..) because the forged pistons i had needed a smaller oil ring and the set i ordered had too much tension to the walls. There's at least one good video on Youtube about measuring ring 'drag' by hooking a fish weighing scale to the rod and dragging the piston up the bore. I think i bought my fish scale online for like $11. Anyways, if i'd had a set of stock rings to reuse that engine would have forged pistons right now and probably wouldn't have a broken piston at the moment. Bleh.
I actually took ALL the stock rings off of like 20 stock pistons i had sitting on my shelf and measured them all in some untouched ~240k mile bores trying to find a set of 4 that didn't have OUTRAGEOUS (or so i thought?...) ring gaps and settled on a set that i could get down to ~0.035 gaps. I thought that was big enough to constitute 'an experiment' but it turns out the thing works fantastic and doesn't even have objectionable blowby. Compression is appropriate and my worst-performing cylinder on leakdown is 12%. Not great, but probably better than a lot of people would guess and it still makes my minivan hilariously fast without pumping all my oil out the crankcase vents. I'm calling it a win and don't wish i had bought new rings at all!
