Your First Engine Job - Honing For Crosshatch And Choosing The Right Stones For Your Rings

and we've reached a point with our 4.0 where things start to get interesting we've done all of our inspections we've checked and measured the cylinders to make sure that they're all round and there's no taper involved and now we've got to hone this thing so at this stage of the game what you do is either going to make or break the end result because choosing the right Stone to tone with and getting the right cross hatch in the cylinder is key to getting the Rings to seat and have the engine operate the way it's supposed to operate maximum efficiency but before we get into any of the actual honing let's talk about the finishes because this is really important you have to know what you're working with to get the best results so engines built let's say from the middle 1980s on back all generally used a cast iron ring now I'm talking about high performance engines race engines or anything like that I'm talking about just regular production engines they all used cast iron rings and cast iron is like it's like the ultimate bulletproof material for rings there's a lot of drag involved in them but they heat they they laugh off heat they're very very forgiving those engines take a rough bore finish now when you get to the middle 1980s and up you start getting to the into the low tension ring packages so you get into a steel ring you get into stainless Rings high performance engines they've got molly rings all of those required different bore finishes so I'm going to show you an example of something that you may run across that you know you don't realize it but this will get you this is a slant block that we had board and honed at machine shop but we didn't specify what kind of ring we were going to use on this engine and so they automatically gave it a fine home a fine finish they use a fine Stone on this the problem here is that we're going to use a cast ring on this engine and the cast ring will not seat properly with this fine home so we're going to have to re-home this with a coarser stone so we get that initial break-in now that's the funny thing when you deal with these older engines the cast ring engines the first minute or so that they're running is is pretty entertaining it's like it's like an exercise in violence within the first few seconds of the engine running the exhaust will glow cherry red you'll see the temperatures start to Skyrocket because there's so much friction happening as the Rings the cast iron rings are scraping away at that rough bore in the process of making their home that it's just pure violence if you took somebody who only deals with modern engines somebody who never who's never dealt with an old cast iron ring engine and you you put a freshly honed cast iron ring engine in front of them and said here spin this thing over they put the wrench on it and they're like oh no there's something desperately wrong here this thing will never run it's terrible because they're used to a low tension ring package that uses a fine hone so this is why you need to know before you go any further you need to know exactly what the ring case with the ring pack consists of and how to hone it before you go any further if you use a coarse Stone like you would use on a cast ring but you're doing it let's say on a stainless ring engine you'll kill the Rings they'll never see or the heat will get to them a little warp they'll distort it'll take all the tension out so you have to know what type of ring you're going to use going in so on our 4.0 these engines originated during that cast ring era but as Evolution went on they went to a lower tension ring package in the 1990s so this uses a steel ring instead of using a cast iron ring this uses a lower tension steel ring so for this we can't use that coarse bore like we would on a cast ring engine we have to go to a medium grip Stone now if let's say it was a stainless ring engine or if it was a Molly ring a high Performance Engine then we would need a fine hole like we have on that slant block over there so for this one for these Rings we need a medium grit Stone so this morning you used to be able to get stone homes at any auto parts store they had the whole variety everything you could use I hit all of the stores locally the only people that had any was our local Napa I got these evercraft Stones I have no idea what part of the world they come from or if they're any good or not we're going to find out in a minute I know I bought one other set of off-brand stones from the same place and they didn't last the entire engine I had to actually buy it go out and buy another set so I could finish honing that last cylinder I hope these things work a little bit better than that but that's that's the thing you need to know going in what finish the Rings you're going to use are going to require in order to seat and that's one of the reasons why you put a cross hatch in the cylinder to help the ring seat to create that mating between the cylinder and the piston ring the other reason for the crosshatch is that the crosshatch even at once once everything is is is mated and the high spots of the crosshatch have been um you know rubbed away there still has to be a little bit of cross hash because what happens is microscopic film of oil fills in that space the low spaces in the crosshatch and it just it acts as like an eternal lubricant there'll always be a light film of oil on the cylinder wall but because it's clung into the cylinder wall it won't burn off during the combustion process and so that's why the proper cross hatch is is crucial to the long life of your engine so what I'm going to do is I'll take a break for a minute and I'm going to take these stones and I'm going to put them on this home and we'll give this thing a shot [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] all right turns out these things are actually pretty good we did a we just did this cylinder just to test it out and they're fine so let's take this one from scratch and we'll cover all of the bases everything you need to know so the first thing is this right away I see it in the comments already you can't hone an engine without a torque plate I know I know right now you absolutely can hone an engine around a torque plate don't listen to anybody who tells you can't hone an engine around a torque plate I can assure you that these engines from the factory regular production engines not Ferraris the Lamborghinis but regular production engines were not honed with a torque plate the reason a torque plate is well what a torque plate is it's a simulation of the cylinder head so it's a thick steel plate that has holes in it so you can hone through it but it matches the deck and it's torqued in place because remember the cast iron is is a lot like rubber people don't think of cast iron as being flexible like rubber but it actually is so when the head is torqued in place the load in the deck from the so from the head bolts slightly distorts the cylinder walls now in an engine an extreme application engine yes it does make a difference it's the difference between making 940 horsepower and 942 horsepower I mean honestly that's really just splitting hairs at that at that stage of the game for a regular production engine mild hot rod engine the kind of stuff that we're going to deal with on this channel it doesn't make any difference so you don't need a torque plate don't listen to the people who tell you you need a torque plate for this all right so like I said this cylinder turned out really good this one we're gonna have to go back to again this was just rough honed check it our initial you know check let's do this one so we wiped it down with gas to get the surface oils off of it and we've got our tension set where we're comfortable with the stones you set the tension with this this spring adjustment over here and this is what we were foxing around on this one to find where it was right and to get the right speed and to get the right RPM speed meaning in and out and RPM obviously the speed of the drill so well we want to keep this thing wet as we're doing this oh that's a little cattywampus okay try to hold the drill perpendicular to the deck explain that to vary the speed of either the uh the RPM or the drill or you're in and out and try to bridge just two sections the very top section here which we know is true there's never any wear right here and the bottom where the skirt rides those are your two true areas of the cylinder and you want to use the stones to bridge those two areas and bring the center of it even with those two areas [Music] all right foreign okay so you know you see our cross hatch now I want a little more cross hatch than that and also you can see we've got a little bit of shadowing like right here but we could seated our our crosshatch our our marks go right through so we know that those aren't really low areas got the typical low area right here just under the ridge but again we can see where our stones are actually making contact with it so you don't want to go too crazy with that it's not that important so here's something that you should be aware of and I'm actually I'm seeing I'm seeing one right here but you won't be able to see it on the camera oftentimes when an engine sits it gets some water in it you'll get some surface rust on the cylinder and it'll stain the cylinder you'll get a dark spot a discoloration and this is why it's important to use a straight leg hone or a fixed Stone hone instead of a dingleberry that dark area could either represent a low spot or it could just be a stain so the the metal stain let's say for for three five eight thousandths of an inch it's deep depending on how bad the rust was or what material it was stained if you can see your crosshatch through the dark area it's fine don't worry about it if you can't see your crosshatch through that dark area that means it's a low spot and you should have caught that when you were checking the cylinder with the ring you remember shining the light up from underneath now if you use a dingleberry hone you would never know if it was a low spot because the cross hatch the scratch marks from the hone would go right into the low spot and you wouldn't recognize it so on this engine here again I know you don't be able to see it because it's so far down the cylinder I'm looking at it right now there's a light discoloration area but I see my marks going right through it so I know that that's nothing to worry about so I want to get just a little bit more of an angle on this I'm gonna I'm gonna slow down the speed the RPM in the drill I'm going to increase the stroke a little bit foreign I can do this [Applause] you'd have to try to stay as mechanical as possible now you're trying to do the work of a machine here [Music] all right and I'm happy with that I'm happy with that beautiful now I'm not going to go crazy cleaning this now because this whole block is gonna have to be cleaned as you're honing remember all of this slurry the material from the stones and the material come off the solar walls is all running into the bottom of the block so that area is going to be scrubbed out it's one of the reasons why changing the oil you know you break in oil very important after like you know just a few hundred miles because all of that just flushes down into the into the pan and you want to get that out so but that looks good I like that cylinder I have to go back and do this one again because like I said we just hit this with some crusty old stones to make sure the cylinder was good and it is good and uh yeah that looks fine I like that so now we do these three and then we're just going to clean the deck we're going to take a block of wood a two by four piece of 2x4 we're going to wrap it with a fine memory cloth and we're just going to go across the deck just to make sure that everything is smooth and straight here check out with a straight edge but I'm sure that the deck is fine on this engine and then uh we go from there our next step is to order parts for this thing that ought to be fun so that's it I hope you got something out of that and I'll see you tomorrow

Channel: Uncle Tony's Garage

Views: 122,101

Keywords: engine rebuild, rebuild engine, engine, cylinder, cylinder hone, utg, uncle tonys garage, engine build

Id: qQJ6LCOSvmI

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023