I've been having some pretty bad oil burning issues on an engine that had previously been rebuild -by myself- merely 7-10k miles ago. new oil ring springs new oil ring carriers and new o-rings in them . I tore the engine down and what do i see? look at these pictures.








the fsm takes .5mm MAX wear and I'm nearly 3 times over that. I'm glad it's not my turbo after all but I'm not understanding why they wore out so quickly. after some thinking my only conclusion is that too many times i had filled my premix AFTER filling the tank because of forgetfulness, but I never completely forgot. I'm now considering buying the aftermarket omp that meters premix instead of engine oil, anyone else know of any other causes to premature oil seal wear?

 

Your springs are the wrong way around.

Or your torqueing the engine down to much.

 

^agree. Putting the sprinssg in the wrong way will allow the rings to spin causing premature wear. And yes that certainly is a LOT of wear!

OP PM'd you
Crispy

 

Triple and quadruple checked the spring orientation, they resist direction of rotation on every face of the rotor, I assembled the engine via atkins video and used I think the max torque spec on the tension bolts on the inside of the DVD cover, but i suppose i could have torqued them down too much somehow. over torque of the flywheel nut would be more likely since i have no precise way to measure that many foot pounds. used a homemade flywheel tool with a spare starter motor gear. After reduction it equated into if i remember right 11 to 14 foot pounds.

 

^ flywheel nut torque has no relevence to internals only to keepingt he flywheel on
The front bolt however is important.
When you changed oil was it "gassy?" Fuel dilution of the oil can lead to under-lubrication. Just tryin to think of reasons you wore out those rings so fast.
Crispy

 

oil sure was gassy, i was getting a lot of oil reversion into the intake too and the runners are oily. at first i thought the compressor side of the turbo was spewing oil but it was dry along with the throttle body and inter cooler piping.

when your oil rings are that bad it's no surprise now to have so much oil in the runners due to reversion. also my oil pressure was pretty weak, i have modded the oil pressure regulators for 90 psi but was getting probably 45 psi max. an entire bottle of lucas stablizer surprisingly reduced the smoke but was no match for rings that bad, i saw maybe 10 psi extra pressure.

what would be most interesting is to know if oil rings that bad were the cause of my low compression. i was getting 65-70 on every single face. Thinking back, i think it started burning oil around the same time i developing hot start issues due to low compression.. hmm

 

Well shittt. this thread makes mee feel great! i had a smokey engine problem, my rings are down farther than them lol. i never spec'ed them out just looked at them and said wow. atkins built the motor it had about 10k on it..i dont know if they changed the rings. they put used rotors in the engine s4t2 and i bet they never changed the rings, its not on the reciept i have. My oil pressure was great, i have mine modded also. but talk about oil in the intake runners lol that was the dead give away of the smokey-n-the-bandit mystery

 

What ended up being the cause of this?

 

I'll bet a forum buck he had the side plates resurfaced. Lapping your plates = a quick death for your oil seals.

 

mine were not resurfaced there the TOTAL opposite lol

 

nope didnt have them resurfaced, still dont know what cause it

 

so if u resurface the plates, don't lap them?

 

the only thing i can guess is that my oil temps were through the roof due to poor airflow through the oil cooler.. but not sure that would cause excessive wear.


side note sounds like lapping only around the outside of the oil seal ring path would be a good idea, how feasible that is is beyond me