Learn me ring and bearing rebuild: best practices

Wae's thread about the diesel Mercedes has me thinking. 

If the engine in the challenge car lives through the challenge, and still runs well, can i freshen it at home on a challenge budget?

Im thinking of a ring and bearing rebuild. 

I remember reading a bunch in car cragt as a young man about it. But not specifics. I know if theres a ridge in tbe top of tbe cylinder, thats probably not a candidate. Same if you ca. Catch your fingernails on any scratches in the crank journals. 

But, past that? Ive never been deep in an engine. Head gasket is as deep as i go. I figure its time...

What are tbe best practices for this? Problems, solutions, etc? A rering kit fir a pt cruiser engine is ~$300, so not stupid cheap but not horrible either.

May never actually do it, but id like to learn about it, and see if its something i might COULD do.

It's really about being clean and careful, and following the recommended run-in procedure.

It's been a while, so some things may have changed since I did one, but some may still apply. 

There are tools for removing the ridge, but I'd agree that if the engine has enough wear for a ridge to be there then it is probably not the best candidate.

If you aren't machining the block, the recommendation used to be for honing the cylinders with a ball hone or stone hone to create a cross-hatch pattern and using cast iron rings.

Make sure you check and adjust ring gaps. You can use a piston slid into the bore to make sure the ring sits square before measuring. 

Get a ring expander (looks a lot like snap ring pliers with different tips) to make installation of rings on the piston easier, especially if using cast iron rings so you don't snap any. Make sure ring gaps are oriented properly on the pistons.

Keep rods and caps together and make sure you keep the orientation the same as when it comes apart (cap to rod, and rod to crank/block)

Use rubber tubing over rod bolts to avoid scratching the crank. You can also use long pieces on the rod bolts to guide the rods to the crank if working alone. 

Assembly lube on the bearings, a light wipe of Dino oil on the cylinder walls. No synthetic or assembly lube on the rings or cylinder walls. You want the ring and bore to wear together to get a good seal. 

If replacing the oil pump you can pack the gears with Vaseline to make it prime easier. 
 

Most of it is covered above.

The dingle ball style cylinder hone is more idiot-proof than the other style.

Just keep it moving.

Plastigauge all main and con rod bearings. 

Beware the "while I'm in there " factor. You can really nickel and dime yourself to death. 

+1 on vaseline in the oil pump, even if you don't replace it. 

Get a manual. Do PT/Neon engines use Torque to yield bolts?

Everything I have learned from good engine builders is that you do not hone when just re-ringing.  "A bore makes more power on its second set of rings"

I'll offer my advice FWIW.  Most of my engine building has been with iron V8s, so this likely doesn't apply to you, but here's my 2 cents.

I wouldn't do bearings and rings.  In some cases it can make things worse.  Here's why.  The journals on the crank don't wear evenly.  They wear more on the compression and ignition sides of the journal.  Same goes for rings and bores.  They don't wear on the front/rear of the cylinder nearly as much as they wear on the inside/outside because of rod angle.

Your rings have spent millions of cycles wearing into the same shape as the cylinder.  Putting new, perfectly-round rings in it could cause a rather dramatic drop in compression and a big uptick in oil consumption.

The way I see it, if you're digging that far into an engine, just do it right.

Or start with a lower-mileage engine from U-pull?

Are you experiencing low oil pressure?  Lots of oil burning?

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

There are no known symptoms at this time, but i only heard it run for about five minutes before steve pulled it. Wasn't too noisy, puff of smoke on starting after god knows how long sitting. 

Ill be assessing it a bit more when i do the preventative maintenance head gasket (and the spare ported  head i have) before sticking it in the challenge car. 

Pete: why? Or is it just anecdotal evidence?

Joel: yep. Torque to yield head bolts and rod bolts at least. I have the 2.0 fsm, but not the pt cruiser one yet.

No time: noted! Thanks!!

Angry: ocd clean. Can and will do. Maybe ill finally have a neon engine where the oil doesn't look like used diesel oil on change!

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Exactly.

All those weird high spots and low spots in the cylinder that you see?  That's the bore wear having self-compensated for how out of round it gets when it is hot and there is a head clamped to the deck by four or five bolts warping the E36 M3 out of everything.  You rehone/rebore it, you're starting from scratch with the uneven wear.

It is amazing how flexible and springy cast iron is, especially engine blocks that are more or less thin lattices of iron that contain cylinder bores and water jackets.

I did that exact thing on the EDV engine that powers the Rallycross Neon a couple years back.  I tore the thing down and sent it out to the machine shop to be cleaned up and have new valve seals & guides installed, decked .005" just to clean it up, line honed, and then all four pots honed.  In retrospect, I could have probably done the guides and seals myself and skipped the rest but since it was a junkyard engine I wanted them to also inspect everything for cracks or warpage.  I re-used the valves and springs but put in new rings, bearings, oil pump, and water pump/timing set.  I used the DNJ gasket set and oil pump, Enginetech rod bearings, Sealed Power mains, the ARP rod bolts for a Focus?, the Gates timing set, and Enginetech head bolts.  Not counting the core motor, it was about a grand back in 2016 or so.

I soaked the pistons in Berryman's to get them all shiny and then it was just a really simple matter of following the FSM to put it all back together.  I think the only special tools I needed were an inch-pound torque wrench, Plastigage, and the harmonic balancer pulley installer from Auto Zone.  There's a PDF of the FSM out there on teh Interwebz which I found invaluable.  If you don't already have it, let me know and I can send it to you.

Best advice is above:  Watch out for whileiminhereitis, it will burn your wallet to a crisp.  In retrospect, I've since been educated that honing out cylinders isn't necessarily the best thing to do since the factory crosshatching is still there and better than you can put on it yourself.  When you take the head apart number the caps and the roller rockers because they have to go back where they belong.  Apparently vertical scratches on cylinder walls aren't that big of a deal.  Don't re-use head bolts or rod bolts - they're TTY.  Be careful what you use as an adapter to make the harmonic balancer installer long enough because you can lose things in the pulley somehow.  Cleanliness is vital.  Assembly lube is really cheap compared to tearing things down because you wiped a bearing on startup.  I'm not sure that you can use "too much" of it. 

I was totally unable to figure out the priming of the oil pump.  As I read the instructions they wanted me to pour oil into the pump from the bottom, then flip the engine over and watch it all drain onto the floor because gravity.  I poured in what I could, closed up the oil pan, and then just sort of went for it.  I ran it for a couple hundred miles and then drained the oil and cut open the filter and didn't find anything in there other than pretty clean oil, so I'm assuming things went okay there.

A section of PVC pipe (3" maybe?) works really well as a rear-main installer.

It's been a little while since I did mine, but feel free to give me a call any time and I'm happy to help in any way I can.

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

Why?

A honed bore is rough.  Rough means friction and heat and wear.  Friction costs power, heat comes from consumed power, wear is bad.

A worn bore, as long as it is not tapered, is as round as it is ever going to be at operating temperature, and is low friction.  Anything else you do to it after that point is only going to hurt things.  And if it IS tapered, you don't need a hone, you need to bore it.

Some ring manufacturers recommend not replacing rings, too, as long as the end gap is still within tolerance.

Buy yourself a set of steel number stamps preferably smaller then 1/8" characters. Before disassembly start at front of engine and stamp rod 1 cap 1 on same side of rod. Then stamp next rod 2 cap 2 on same side of rod until you have stamped all rods and caps. Do this before disassembly. This way you will know where the rod goes and also that rod and cap are assembled the same way as they were. When rods are machined the bore diameter is very precise but reversing orientation of cap can result in out of round bore and binding. Kind of basic  but important. 

In reply to pirate :

Iirc, 2.4's are cracked rod caps. You physically can't put them on incorrectly and have everything come out right. Plus I want to say they have an offset to them, but it's been a few years since I had one apart.

In reply to Ranger50 :

That's my recollection as well.  I use a paint marker, ziplock bags, bits of cardboard to push bolts through, and/or those little tags that come on a string.  Everything gets marked and stored in a plastic tub.

In reply to wae :

That's more in-depth than what I do. Bolts go in a bucket unless needed for holding something on to go the machine shop or somewhere else. Everything basically gets put in a pile, cleaned, then sorted back out with like mates. With today's modern components, the specifics don't really matter anymore like years past. I've put enough 3.7/4.7/5.7's back together with the same approach and never a problem afterwards.

So years ago I had a smokey B210; it got to burning a quart of oil every 125 miles, so having only paid $300 for it I decided to do the bare minimum.

No hone, no lovingly cleaning parts; I pulled the head with the intake and exhaust manifolds still attached.

I changed the rod bearings and put new rings in it. Slapped it all back together. About a year later I sold the car to a co-worker and her husband used it as a commuter car for the next 5 years (no clue what happened to it after that.

I did a similar approach with the motor in my 1200; the motor had around 100hrs of race track use. The bores looked not so great but I slapped rings and bearings in it and got two more seasons out of it. 

Sure the motor made less power (pulled 100 less rpm done the main straight) but it ran well enough.

This is escalating quickly:

Brother Dustin has a "ran when pulled" 80s 5.0 under the bench. His z car is quickly eating cyl 6 on the l28. We're v8 swapping it, and ring and bearing rebuild the 5.0

Pt after the challenge if it lives