340 Rod questions

If the rings are fairly new and the cylinders still have some x hatch in them you’ll be ok. But this looks like an old high mileage motor that already had a broken ring. In an old motor the cylinders wear and become out of shape, the rings wear into this same shape. Over time the rings lose some of their radial tension.

This is why they rebore, to bring the cylinder back to being perfectly round, then the rigid hone fine tunes the bores and leaves the x hatch to help the new rings break into the cylinder walls creating the ring seal.

Put a new ring in an old cylinder and hold a light behind it and you’ll see where it’s not touching. The brush or ball hone won’t take the wear out of the cylinder, but the x hatch it creates will help to seal the rings by wearing them into the shape of the old bore. But this takes time to happen. The cylinder walls glaze up after time making it difficult for a ring to reseal to it, that’s why you need to hone it.

Do what ever you want, I’m just trying to give you some advice, I did what you are doing and in the long run I had to take everything apart and do it right. I would have saved a lot of time and money doing it right once.