On another forum, we were discussing boring, honing, ring seating.
PackardV8 said:
Back in the bad old days of cast iron rings and hand honing, it took a thousand miles for rings to wear in and stop smoking, if they ever did.
Another poster offered:
But there was a trick ... put it together with no oil. Lightly mist the cylinder walls with water. Let it grow a thin surface rust. Start that hummer up dry, the rings will seat immediately.
It actually works
In sixty years in and around building engines, I never saw or heard of this. How did I miss such a gem?
Jack Vines
Studebaker-Packard V8 Limited
Obsolete Engineering
Along similar lines, have you heard about using wheel bearing grease in place of exhaust gaskets? Like manifold to head, especially with iron manifolds that tend to warp if you try to use the squishy composite gaskets? You have to use the old tan grease, not the new-fangled super moly synthetic junk.
PackardV8 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 2:13 pm
On another forum, we were discussing boring, honing, ring seating.
PackardV8 said:
Back in the bad old days of cast iron rings and hand honing, it took a thousand miles for rings to wear in and stop smoking, if they ever did.
Another poster offered:
But there was a trick ... put it together with no oil. Lightly mist the cylinder walls with water. Let it grow a thin surface rust. Start that hummer up dry, the rings will seat immediately.
It actually works
In sixty years in and around building engines, I never saw or heard of this. How did I miss such a gem?
I have been a stickler for using the correct grade of Loctite in prescribed applications since i was an apprentice.
Some years back a person i know who always thought i was bullshit fussy on fasteners, tapers etc told me all that fancy stuff i was using was now redundant as he had been shown a better way.
The better way was to use a couple of drops of battery acid instead of a clean dry taper to fit a drive pulley on an early Harley engine, this correction of my ways was to be told in front of a group of people for best effect.
He had encountered loosening pulleys a couple of times on the same engine, i had told him that both the shaft and now the pulley were damaged and needed to be replaced as a unit.
Anyway, some time later the pulley had to come off, or should i say, not come off. Much heat and eventually cutting the pulley was reqd for removal.
There is something in doing jobs with tried and proven methods. Rust is not one of them.
PackardV8 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 3:23 pm
My machinist refuses to use any type of exhaust manifold-to-head gasket. He says he's never found any which won't rust out or burn out.
When doing warranty work on Motorhomes because the iron manifolds would warp and actually break the bolts sometimes because that manifold was supposed to get cooled through the engine cooling system; anything to inhibit temperature transfer into the engine water jacket was a definite No-No.
If the surfaces were corroded or pitted it was recommended to use ONLY soft copper gaskets between those manifolds and the cylinder heads in order to help the transfer of heat.
Wheel bearing grease cooks off and turns into effectively a carbon seal. Works fantastic as long as the mating surfaces are flat; without a squishy gasket most parts aren't able to warp because there's nowhere for them to go other than where they should be.
Works on v-bands and other flanges as well as manifolds, doesn't work on things like "o-ring" header flanges, not enough surface area.
turbo camino wrote: ↑Mon Dec 04, 2023 3:35 pm
Wheel bearing grease cooks off and turns into effectively a carbon seal. Works fantastic as long as the mating surfaces are flat; without a squishy gasket most parts aren't able to warp because there's nowhere for them to go other than where they should be.
Unless the tensile force on the bolts is great enough to break those bolts.
It is a pretty common occurrence inside the insulated "doghouse" of a Motorhome.
At Daytona in 1963 we snuck into the pits and I watched Smokey Yunick dust a can on Bon Ami cleanser down the carb of a 421 Pontiac engine to seat the rings
IN the early seventies where i worked we had a number of early Case W7 & W9 loaders, the operators would idle these things for ages as they thought the bosses were checking the hour meters to see if they had been on the job.
Periodically these engines would start to use oil at an abnormal rate, the fix was to use Case's de-glazing powder in a Case labeled shaking cylinder, peel the label off and what do we have? Bon Ami elbow grease powder. The regime to rectify the oiling was to get the engine up to temp,remove the inlet pipe, crowd all the rams, hold the engine at max rpm, and start dusting the engine. Once the container was finished refit the inlet pipe and get it out on the road with as much load on it as possible whilst still crowding the rams, standing on the brakes till the engine near died, and run it like that for a period of time.
I am testing my memory here but i think that model engine had something like four upper and two lower sets of rings. This procedure would settle the oil consumption down considerably.
Some time later a friend of mine after hearing me recall this procedure in a conversation did this to a Cleveland with not similar results. But that is another story.
Tom68 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 16, 2023 6:05 pm
Bon Ami down the carb is desperate, probably comes from this old trick explained by Don Bass.
20231217_095342.jpg
Not sure how vertical scratching helps but they had plenty of experience.
This was a valid method with the original BonAmi which contained only feldspar. It doesn't scratch because the feldspar crumbles to a microscopic power which becomes a lapping compound and polishes without scratching.
Not sure, but I think the original product is no longer available and the new recipe BonAmi might scratch.
wwmtlineman wrote: ↑Sat Dec 16, 2023 1:50 pm
At Daytona in 1963 we snuck into the pits and I watched Smokey Yunick dust a can on Bon Ami cleanser down the carb of a 421 Pontiac engine to seat the rings
I watched my father and his machinist pal pour water with Bon Ami in it through a 235 Chevy and Hudson Hornet to seat chrome rings. They used a quart Pepsi bottle and metered it with a thumb, followed by a few more quarts of plain water to rinse it.
The Hudson was dad's daily driver for the next 10 years. One night about 4 years after the Bon Ami job, to get to where we were going deer hunting before the crack of dawn, we went 204 miles in 1hr. 56min. in the Hornet on a two lane road.
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