GAPTIZE YOUR JUNK? THE AP FOR GAP!

hey guys welcome to what I'm calling happy hour and a horsepower so let's talk turbos Cheers today we're gonna talk turbos are more specifically ring gap for turbos one of the most common questions I get is hey what rig gap should I run or do I have to run ring gap some variation of that how much ring gap can I get away with do I have to take it apart all that stuff and despite the fact that I've run a number of videos and a number of posts on Facebook and Instagram and lots of other guys have done - they've done lots and lots of turbo testing we always tell them what ring got to run I constantly get this question so I decided hey let's go ahead and make a video and talk about ring gap not just about what ring gap you should use but what ring gap is why there's ring gap in the first place how much you should use should you use ring gap to increase it should you not do it can you run it without it all of that stuff so let's get going first of all what is ring gap well if you take a look at piston rings from any manufacturer for any motor whether it's an LS big-block Chevy small-block Chevy modular for whatever it is any motor has ring deficits and the reason that they have that is if you take a look at a ring in a bore you'll see that the ends of the ring don't touch like in the photo so the rings don't touch for a good reason the reason that they don't touch is because piston rings like the rest of the motor operate over a wide variety of different temperatures so when you increase the temperature with those rings they grow and when they grow that gap gets closer and closer together as those rings as they grow if they get to the point where they touch then bad things happen that's why people break Pistons a lot of people think that when they run a motor under boost and it breaks a ring land they think oh that's a weak piston the reality is the piston has nothing to do with it it's all of the ring so what happens is if that ring gets too hot and all of the ring gap goes away and the Rings touch and butt together what will happen is when the Pistons going up and down they will momentarily seize that piston in the bore they'll want to stop it and when they do that when the ring ceases momentarily in the bore it snaps the ring land off usually in between the first and the second ring then it can snap the top off it can do all sorts of things but that's what will happen that's not a weak piston it's because there was no more ring gap which is why on a turbo application or in nitrous application and they started to boost it application or high horsepower deal we add ring gap the reason why is because there's more temperature in those instances so we add ring gap because there's more temperature as the more temperature there is the more heat you're gonna put in the Rings the more they're gonna grow the closer they're gonna get together and the more chance of that happening of those bad things happening so that's why we run rig AB that's why the factory ring has ringed up in it and that's why we increase it when we run boost because we're trying to give room for that piste for the ring gap for the piston ring to grow and not touch above all you do not want those rings budding together and snapping the piston her deepest and we've all seen that lots of LS guys but everybody big-block Chevy guys small-block Chevy guys modular Ford we've all done it trust me I've done it on lots and lots of motors because we've run lots of motors we didn't want to go to the trouble of taking the motor apart because you know it takes so long to do that it really doesn't but we it takes so long to do that that we don't want to take it apart and take the rings out file the Rings put them back in and put it all back together and then try to run it despite the fact that that's actually the right way to do it so now let's talk about that there are a lot of guys especially in the LS world and and obviously I'm one of them that advocate going to the wrecking yard getting a motor bring it back to the dyno or putting it in a car and adding a cam springs and boosts to it and away you go and that works very well here's the problem with that and this is why I always like to take the motor apart and increase the ring gap the question there is hey can I get away with not taking it apart and and increasing there in gaps yes absolutely there are lots of guys out there and when I use the term Lots I don't what that number is I don't know what percentage it is I don't know what number is but there are guys out there that take these motors from the wrecking yard leave them the way they are change the camp Springs and boost baby put new oil in it or something and go on run it in it works as long as it's tuned well it works the flip side of that is there are also guys that go out there and try this and blow the motor up so if we discount the number of people that shouldn't be tuning it or don't know how to 200 or had it tuned incorrectly that hurt it because there was too much timing or not enough you or those kinds of things where it was actually just a ring gap problem we still have some of some on both sides of that camp we have some wear at work then we have some wear it doesn't I and I know because I've been on both sides of that and the reason that that happens is because there's not a universal thing everybody can't go down and grab a motor from the wrecking yard and add a ton of boosts to it and have it work out it also means that every time you go and run one that you don't have to do ring gap because sometimes it does work out and that's why we have this that's all you have this battle between these two camps lots of guys go out and do it and they had success here's my personal feeling and this is this is just me the way that I feel about it the way that I would do it I'm not telling you it's absolute because nothing that I tell you on this channel will ever be absolute I will never tell you you have to run this cam because this is the best cam I'm not one of those guys there's lots and lots of guys on the internet that'll tell you whatever thing that they're selling like you have to run this turbo or you have to run this camshaft I'm not that guy what I'm going to tell you on my channel is when I ran this cam or this turbo here's what it did you get to choose if you like that or you don't like that I don't care it doesn't make any difference to me I don't sell anything at an offer anything I'm not I'm not one of the manufacturers I don't care about any of that when I run a dyno test one thing is a and one thing is being when I compared a to B here's what happened you guys get to choose what you want to do so with the ring gap situation here's why I like to get rooms when I put a and doing on the dyno is much easier because I can take it apart and put everything back together and really fast is easy to work on I'll have to lean over any fenders I don't have to do any of that but here's why I like to do it if I'm putting a motor in a car I only want to do it once it's a lot of work to put especially like just dropping a motor in a car takes no time at all I mean setting it in there it's actually fairly easy but then getting everything and guys that do this should know exactly what I'm talking about then getting everything hooked up getting all of the exhaust hook up getting all the air intakes hooked up getting the inner coolers the tubing the the wiring all of the ten thousand different hoses and vacuum lines there's nothing you have to put in there all of that stuff takes a lot of time to actually get it up and running so that you could take it to the dyno or go make passes or street tune it or whatever you're gonna do that takes a lot of time and it also takes a lot of time not a lot of time but you want that motor to be in there for a long time so if you're gonna if you plan on putting this motor in your car and going out and running at the drag strip and make it passes out feeling of excuse me whatever it is in my mind what I want to do is I want the thing to be right I don't even like putting a motor in like if I got a crate motor from somebody from Chevrolet or GM performance or Ford Racing or whoever it is even if they're the most reputable company in the world and they're the best engine builder in the world if I got a motor from somebody I would run it on the dyno before I put it in the car because I want to put it in the car and I wanted to be the last time I do that I want it to be right which is why I'm a big advocate of ring gap my problem with ring gap is I've run some from the dyno where we didn't change the Rinka I've run three hundred shots of nitrous from a motor that we just brought over from the wrecking yard in this one we didn't care about and that we expected to bring we fully expected the thing to blow up but it did which means that on that one the ring got the factory ring gap was enough and here's the problem with that it's a little bit of a Russian roulette deal it's a little bit of a roll of the dice when you get a motor from the wrecking yard you have no idea what the ring gap is okay there's no Universal number that every five three or four eight or 600 that you take apart will have the same ring gap from the wrecking yard it's just I mean I've measured a bunch of different ones they vary by five or six thousands and five or six thousandths can be the difference between the thing working and not work blowing up and not blowing up and here's the other problem and here's one of the things that I get a lot of and we all know that this is true because we're all guilty of it hey can I just go get a motor from their wrecking yard and put it in and run it and without changing the ring gap I'm only gonna run seven pounds now I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard I'm only gonna run seven pounds because that never happens the problem is we run seven pounds and we we promise to be good and we only want to run low boost but then we never do if seven pounds is good if I just turn it up a little bit it's gonna be really good and it is when you go from seven pounds to ten pounds man the thing is awesome it feels so much better but you don't be really good after running it at seven pounds or ten pounds he's like 12 pounds 12 pounds it's not gonna hurt you thing right and then 15 and then 20 and that's the problem we never do what we're say we're gonna do because boost is so addicting so you're 7 pound thing became 10 and 12 and 15 and then you blew it up and if you did ring gap on it if you increase the ring gap that probably wouldn't happen unless the tune was wrong but it wouldn't happen from the Rings touching you can eliminate that as a possibility if you increase the ring gap and like I said I want to do it just because I want to put the motor in and be done with it one time one and done that's my motto so the other problem is that in the question I get asked all the time is regarding ring gap is hey how much boost can I run without changing the ring gap well that's because over these vast years when people have been doing this they equate ok it's safe at 7 pounds it's safe at 10 pounds it's safe at 12 pounds whatever the number is the reality is there's no direct correlation there let me give you an example on my personal 5 liter Mustang when I ran at the Silver State I ran it was rounding at seven seven and a half pounds of boost with no intercooler on it it was a cold day out and had a good cold air intake on it but I ran seven pounds on that thing seven and a half pounds excuse me for 32 minutes wide open throttle so the the reason that the Rings expand is not because of boost there's not a boost ring gap equivalent it's ring temperature and the problem is boost isn't the only thing that affects ring temperature ring temperature can be affected by a number of things it can be affected by the fuel that you're using certainly the timing the charge air like if you run seven pounds with no intercooler versus having an air core or the fuel you use if you run the 85 it's obviously gonna be cooler but one of the things that affects it is the amount of time under load like if you're running seven pounds that's fine and you or even ten pounds let's say and you rip through the gears and it's you you're at wide open throttle for maybe nine or ten seconds a lot of guys can get away with that but what if your roll racing on the freeway and all of a sudden you're on the ass for 15 20 30 40 seconds however long you have then the window gets narrower and narrower and then you blow something up that's the problem with ring gap is that we we tend to increase the tend to increase the boost anyway and even if we don't it's not just oh yeah ten pounds is okay this guy ran ten pounds yabbies only running ten pounds rolling through two or three years at a time you know showing off on the street he wasn't in it for a long period of time and if you're in it for a long period of time if you're towing with it you know a lot of guys now want to tow with small turbos and stuff and that works very well but again if you're at under load under boost for a long time even low boost can put enough temperature in the ring gap to cause the Rings to close and break something that's why I like putting ring gap in so what I want you guys do is make sure to comment and let me know what you think let me know if you have any more questions about ring gap and about turbos and about camshafts I'm gonna keep doing this stuff and again this applies not just to LS motors but to everything one of the rules of thumb that guys can use is the question always is how much ring gap should I run when I run my LS motor well I normally run between 28 and 30 and for me people ask well is that the top ring or the second ring or which one is is a twenty or thirty me it doesn't matter that's a no go go thing when I first started doing the Big Bang motors I had 35 thousandths in some of those so the big concern there is hey what about blow by in my opinion what I've seen on the dyno is even when we increase it to 30,000 by didn't go up appreciably as a matter of fact there was more of an instance and blow by with less ring gap and and and loose rings you know old tired rings then there was with rings that were seated that had extra ring gap so I haven't seen the ring gap changed things dramatically now obviously a direct back-to-back test would be the best way to figure that out and we could measure that but if you a drink app um running under booths actually kind of helps seal the thing up so I wouldn't worry about that the ring gap deal it's not gets not gonna be there's not gonna be a blow by issue we always vent our crank a system to atmosphere anyways we don't draw ever draw the stuff in and we obviously don't pressurize that by having it hooked up under boost cuz that's not a good idea so I wouldn't worry about the ring gap thing in terms of in terms of blow-by because that doesn't seem to be an issue if there's not blow by before you added the ring gap that probably won't be blow by after and trust me we've run rings like on these BIGBANG motors that had 250,000 miles on them that's right well all we did was take the ring out and clean all the gunk off of it put ring gap in and put it back in that's something that has a quarter of a million miles on it and it still ran great and we still made a ton of power I mean some of these we made over 1500 horsepower so obviously the factory rings are good they work well put enough ring gap in it guys make sure to LIKE share subscribe ring the bell come on help me out all that likes your subscribe stuff it's right down here right at the bottom right at the bottom of the video thanks for watching guys

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 190,239

Keywords: boost, ring gap, turbo, blower, nitrous, heat, load, ls, chevy, Ford, Dodge

Id: zyJj6wWArFo

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020