Ring and bearing rebuild

In reply to wae :

I may take you up on the offer of the anaerobic sealant. But before I go there I need to make sure that I will be able to use it and the engines are worth rebuilding.

As far as cleaning, if i have a bare block i just purple power and water blast it until i think it's good, then blow the moisture off with compressed air and spray WD-40 (or equivalent) all over it until im going to actually assemble it. 

If you're talking about the horrible mess that comes from honing cylinders, after washing the block the last thing i actually do before installing pistons is fold up some of those blue paper shop towels and squirt a little ATF on it and wipe through the cylinders, and I keep doing it until the color of the rag stops changing. At first it'll come back with some fine grey metal powder stuck into it, and i keep folding, ATF'ing and wiping with towel after towel until it comes out looking the same as it went in. Then I choose to believe it's clean enough and install pistons! I think with anything you just put together after using any kind of abrasives on the engine it's a good idea to change the oil out pretty quick after you get it running.

I'll throw in my pennies.

A re-ring and bearing rebuild was a common practice back in the old days when rings were cast iron and bearings were brass/bronze.  The sacrificial part was the rings (not the cylinders) and the bearings (not the crank).  Harder moly rings and some of the newer materials are better at sealing and lasting longer, but at the expense of crankshaft wear and cylinder wear.

I suggest before you hone, take a sharpie and draw a crap-ton of circles in the cylinder.  I often draw a screw pattern the whole way up with a "thread pitch" of about an inch.   Then hone.  If you get the texture you want and you see any sharpie left in the cylinder, new rings won't help much.  You'll be taking out rings that have spent millions of cycles wearing into the same egg-shaped pattern and putting perfectly round rings into a mis-shapen cylinder.  You might make things worse.

Bearings also tend to make the crankshaft wear more on the thrust side of the journals.  For this job, I strongly suggest micrometers.  Plasti-gauge is notoriously inaccurate, especially on journals that aren't perfectly round.  Plasti-gauge was originally designed for very large commercial engines with journals that are more like 2 feet in diameter.  The amount of error that plastigauge exhibits on a 3" journal can be huge.

I'm an old hat at this kind of stuff, but I still farm some of it out.  Its just that I have the gauges and experience to know how to measure things and then know what to ask the machine shop to do instead of just taking their suggested package of a full service rebuild.  You can hone it yourself and then decide if it needs an overbore and pistons.  Be careful when honing though.  It is possible to remove enough material that you get piston slap or poor ring seal.

Re-assembly is as easy as getting a shop manual and following the instructions.  For the most part, if you can put IKEA furniture together, you can assemble an engine.

TL;DR... I usually fully disassemble and mic everything (except the bores... I don't have a good inside micrometer or accurate enough calipers).  That will tell me if I need crank work or not.  Then I do the sharpie/hone trick.  If all the sharpie goes away before I take too much material off, re-assemble with rings.  If not, I'll have a shop tank it and determine if it can be further honed and keep the stock pistons, or if it needs an overbore and hone.  I often have the shop tank the heads and do a valve job.  You really do save a ton of money assembling yourself.

In short, you have to determine if the components are candidates for rings and bearings before assuming it is the right fix.

Thanks Curtis I was hoping you would chime in.

I can scan in the FSM for your motors if you would like. 

In reply to Vigo :

Kind of what i thought, except laquer thinner or brake cleaner instead of atf. Why atf?

And what about the staining/etc on the insides of the oil galleys/heads/oil pan/etc? Just clean and debris free, but not spotless?

In reply to Curtis :

That all makes a lot of sense. A whole lot. Especially the bores. I need to reread the post a few more times and let it roll around in my head for a while until it either makes perfect sense or makes me question my methods .

In reply to Professor_Brap :

I need to look on my computer, but i think i have the fsm for the 97 neon. I know i don't have anything 2.4 related. I appreciate the offer 

Dusterbd13-michael said:

In reply to Vigo :

Kind of what i thought, except laquer thinner or brake cleaner instead of atf. Why atf?

And what about the staining/etc on the insides of the oil galleys/heads/oil pan/etc? Just clean and debris free, but not spotless?

I usually use a heavier solvent like brake cleaner or acetone.  I think the ATF is a good idea to leave a protective film and would save you a step, but probably takes longer than using a solvent.

If it is completely disassembled, I make a bucket of really hot soapy water and a selection of bottle brushes.  That plus a pressure washer makes quick work, but you have to follow it up immediately with a comprehensive coating of some kind of oil or it will rust within minutes.  I had the brilliant idea once of using an old Apple Butter caldron and build a good hot fire under it to boil a little 3-cylinder diesel block from a John Deere tractor.  By the time it got cool enough to extract the block, it had rusted enough that I needed a little machining.  In hindsight it might have worked if I threw a rope down a cylinder and gave myself a handle to get it out.

I use brake cleaner as well.

Curtis is 100% correct on how to go about a rebuild BUT:

I've taken smokey engines and simply just stuffed new rings in them and called it good. This is absolutely not the correct way to go about it but the engines did thousands of mile without issue. It's budget friendly.

Tom1200 said:

I use brake cleaner as well.

Curtis is 100% correct on how to go about a rebuild BUT:

I've taken smokey engines and simply just stuffed new rings in them and called it good. This is absolutely not the correct way to go about it but the engines did thousands of mile without issue. It's budget friendly.

Did it end up stopping the smoke with just a rering? 

Im still a bit peeved that my rebuilt b series honda motor smokes in vtec as I was hoping it would solve my previous smoking issues on my non vtec motor. Consumption isn't terrible, considering it mostly just sees, occasional weekend driving, autocross and the occasional track day. But I've put 6,000+ miles on it since the fall of 2017 and its been holding up fine. Still it feels like I gained all this power (177 whp/128wtq vs a stock b18b1) only to be in the same position as before with regards to oil consumption, its a mixed feeling. It was a combination of the machine shop doing all the main work, but friends and I assembling it together. 

But I really don't want to tear it down again to determine if the break-in process was the issue or the ring and bearing clearances are causing the blowby issues, or if its from the head. But I have a spare block, crank, rods and pistons and head that Im considering another go-around. 

Northern auto parts  is my go to for stock rebuild parts.

I've never been to a machine shop that didn't have a posted price list. Last month I priced out normal rebuild work at the local machine shop in the back of the Car Quest and it was $75 for block cleaning,  $30 per hole for boring, and $12 per journal to cut bearings on a crankshaft.  So cleaned and bored your block would be $200 and with 5 mains and 4 rods it would be just over $100 for the crank work.

I'd at least call some local shops. At those prices it's almost a wash with the cleaning supplies and time it would take me to start out with a freshly cleaned and bored block.

Kind of what i thought, except laquer thinner or brake cleaner instead of atf. Why atf?

I dont think ATF is the best possible thing to use, but it hits a few marks of being 'a liquid with some surface tension', being cheap, and leaving a film to discourage rust and excess friction at startup. A stronger solvent is probably better for the cleaning aspect. Most of my engine builds have been, like.. beyond budget and were mostly mixing and matching the best used parts from several disassembled motors with new ROD bearings (rarely mains!) and gaskets. 

Vigo said:

Kind of what i thought, except laquer thinner or brake cleaner instead of atf. Why atf?

I dont think ATF is the best possible thing to use, but it hits a few marks of being 'a liquid with some surface tension', being cheap, and leaving a film to discourage rust and excess friction at startup. A stronger solvent is probably better for the cleaning aspect. Most of my engine builds have been, like.. beyond budget and were mostly mixing and matching the best used parts from several disassembled motors with new ROD bearings (rarely mains!) and gaskets. 

I love this.  Mix n match used parts. Takes balls.  I vote to make him a GRM hero. :)

I called my local Napa who put me in touch with a different machine shop than the one I normally use. Hot tanking and honing is $85 and crank resurfacing is $35. Lock cheaper than my normal shop, but I wonder if cheaper is just as good in this case.

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

One of our local shops that cheap I wouldnt give a mower motor to, the did a piss poor job of the work we gave them. 

I have a Ford 302 right now in my E36 track car.  I had planed to re-use the short block because a PO previously replaced the main & rod bearings a couple years ago.  I have a used set of Trick Flow heads I was going to put on it, with appropriate top end stuff to feed air and gas. 

It doesn't burn oil, static compression tests pretty good (+/- 10% consistency), and power is good on the track BUT at higher RPMs, it sprays oil out of the dipstick.

I could give it the Curtis treatment and see how it fares, but my patience is kind of running out with the car, and I'm hearing the call of a new, dyno-tested, crate longblock 347.

I love this.  Mix n match used parts. Takes balls.

Well, part of it is just the fact that I've only ever had to rebuild my own engines because i broke piston ring lands due to detonation. I've never 'broken' an engine any other way (ran it out of oil/pressure, overheated it to the point that rings lost tension, mis-shifted it until the rods came out, etc). I think i let a block crack from freezing water, once..

I had  summer job in  machine shop when i was 15. At that time there were still a lot of 'old' engines getting rebuilt and we were doing the full gamut of machining tasks to them. I remember disliking when i had to work on cast-iron straight 6 cylinder heads due to their weight, if that says anything. In the time since then, the entire market for machine shops has shrunk tremendously and there are only a few left in town (and i live in a big town). Newer engines are so much better that there's rarely a need for much machine work unless a human operator screwed something up. It seems like most of what happens in small machine shops (i.e. shops that don't have big contracts with parts distributors to rebuild cores and just stick them in inventory) is  just replacing bent valves from failed timing belts. 

Depending on how much I know about what happened to it or what it sounded like before disassembly, there are a whole lot of measurements i'd be very comfortable skipping on a modern engine. If something needs checking, the parts will probably tell me when i tear it down. A lot of older stuff  (the stuff i worked on when i was 15)  I dont trust farther than i can throw it. 

@AW614 in my case the rering solved the smoking and oil consumption (the car was burning a two quarts per tank full of gas)

@Curtis, Vigo is a spendthrift, when I said slap rings in it I meant rings and rings only. Rod bearings would have added another $20. I spent $20 on a set of rings, $15 head gasket and $12 for an oil pan gasket. I pulled pulled the head complete with manifolds to lighten the motor and two burley friends lifted the motor out as I was to cheap to rent a hoist. Datsun A-series short blocks weigh around 150lbs. Pulled the motor Friday night and then stuck it back in Saturday morning.

As for mixing and matching parts I've routinely done this. My current race motor has a freshly bored block with repurposed forged pistons, crank, high pressure oil pump and cam. I put in new rings and all the bearings. AdditionallyI put in a fresh clutch plate but reused the pressure plate and throw out bearing.

 I've been doing this for years and only experienced two motor failures, both were  driver induced (revved to 9200 rpms one to many times) the other was due to radiator failure and me while dicing on the open laps of a race not noticing the temp gauge was pegged.

Gotcha.