Stolen from a Mopar Facebook friend

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318willrun said:
i have one. Do you use moly rings or cast rings, and what grit is your hone?
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Moly race rings and I’m pretty sure it’s a 320 grit but I’d have to check. I’ve only bought two in 45 years and I still have both. I had a 9 second TRW engine back in the late 1980’s that the bores were terrible. Like .011 terrible. Moly rings wouldn’t seal and I had to finish points so I ordered a broken ring pak from California and ran cast, cast rings. That engine ended up running 9.82 and lasted a long time. It was then that my buddy told me to get away from using oil on my rings and switch to transmission fluid and I’ve done so ever since. My engine is broke in without a dyno before my first pass down the track.
 
used the dingel ball hone, trans fluid and moly rings. worked fine on a 110K rebuild with stock pistons.
Sister got sprayed with the fluid cause she was "personing" the squirt can.
 
I stone honed 4 cylinders of my beater truck with the pistons STILL IN THE BORES! Sort of a "proof of being an idiot" and it literally reduced the blowby of the 247,000 mile motor by half. Im gonna ball hone it properly once I pull it again and get some new cast rings.
 
You guys are talking about gasoline engines. Before the days of throw away lawn mowers. We would rebuild them and a ball gone was the best. Those Briggs 3.5 HP would run another 6-8 seasons with a ball gone and new rings. And those engines see the worst conditions. All the customer cared about was not having to breath oil smoke anymore cutting their 1/4 acre. Ball hones are really under rated.
 
My old 408 that was rebuilt three times and in need of its 4th rebuild had bores so bad I wore out two sets of stones cleaning it up before I could even use a dingle bar hone. Those bores were terrible and I should have taken that one to the machine shop. But it still ran 9.74@2850 pounds in my car and 10.11@3200 pounds in my sons duster.
 
My Dad always used ball hones on tractor engines when I was a kid.
 
I will dingle berry hone an engine if doing a re-ring. It will give the cylinders some bite to seat the new rings. Be aware that if you use too coarse of a stone and run moly rings it could take the moly off right away.
Here's one of my 340's I freshened up a few years ago. Checked the cylinders with a bore gauge prior to honing and they were straight.
Oh yeah, ATF works great and sometimes I use marvel mystery oil in a oil squirter can.

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At work when I'm done with moly rings 501 stones =280 grit I squirt trans fluid and hit it 5 pumps with the plateau brush.
Works very well great oil retention
 
I love transmission fluid for dipping my porting burrs, honing, use the old stuff for burning my brush piles, cylinder wall cleaning, piston installation, undercoating my vehicles, and hell I even put it in my transmissions.
 
I've used a hand-drill stone hone. Neither those nor the ball-hones will fix an out-of-round cylinder, but the machine hones at shops will. Per TV shows, you actually hear them change from a whack-whack sound to a smooth sound as the cylinder becomes round. Shops usually hone after an over-bore. I've read that one can buy 5 mil over pistons for a few engines, but don't know about Mopars. You would likely need those if not overboring and rounding out a cylinder, if enough metal left.

The latest I've read, is if you see the OE honing marks everywhere in the cylinder, that insures no significant wear and still round since those scratches are only ~1 mil deep. That is not unusual in engines since MPFI became common (1990's), even at >200K miles. I think it was running rich, especially when cold, which put raw gasoline on the cylinder walls to cause rapid wear. Diesel engines never had as much wear since the fuel is a decent lubricant. Today, the consensus is to not even scratch-hone if you find the OE honing marks, just install new rings and can re-use the OE pistons if no cracks. But, if using cast-iron rings, new scratches might be good to help them wear to seat well against the walls. If you do, clean the cylinder walls very well with soapy water to get all the grit off, and keep going until it passes the white-glove test.
 
I've always used a stone hone to straighten the cyl walls, fine stone finish with cast rings, - and for Moly rings, after honing, - I make a "slipper" of a scotch pad and staple, - that slips over the stones, to final finish the bore, cuz as mentioned, the wall finish can wipe the moly off the ring face .
Any atf/lube oil, mixed 50\50 solvent/varsol .
 
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