well, seems i have to go even deeper into this rebuild, so now i'm looking at having to replace all that stuff, too. am mainly interested in opinions and recommendations for my '91 L98 - all street use, putting an LT4 hotcam in, mostly stock otherwise. been looking at the ol' summit and jegs books, looks like anywhere from 16-40 $ for pistons and 145 $ for "total seal" gapless rings. anybody using these with good things to say? i don't see the need for "forged" pistons, so probably federal mogul or speed pro? federal mogul bearings? putting all new bearings in, probably using same rods. block is being bored .030 over, by the way... thanks.

KAM

 

For street, nothing fancy required. Regular moly rings would be fine. Just make sure it all is capable of handling the revs that the cam will produce. ARP rod bolts about the only thing I see missing.

 

you don't want gapless rings for sterrt applications. i'd buy kb hyper pistons FM bearings, not clevite they're junk, cloyes timing set, melling m55 pump arp pump drive shaft,lunati or comp valve springs, arp rod bolts, fel pro gaskets

 

Speed-Pro hypers, Hastings moly face rings, Clevite 77 (Michigan) bearings, and Fel-Pro gaskets.

 

ede - why not gapless rings for street app?

i have a new spring set with the cam i got, so i'm good there. also have a new melling pump and melling shaft.

hyper pistons and other recommendations sound good. thanks always for the inputs. this is my first time doing this, so relying heavily on y'all's help...

KAM

 

the local machine shop/guru aroudn here told me that the gapless rings work real well but they wear the cylinder like crazy compared to normal rings...

 

I've been running those junk Clevite 77's in the 396 since 1997. I guess I'd better not get on it too hard, or I might tear up the poor engine...

Seriously, though, I had heard rummblings about changes in Clevite materials, manufacturing location (EPA problems with the tri-metal application process), and quality. I don't know of any documentation to that effect, though.

 

I've seen a number of QC defects in Clevite bearings in recent years. My favorite was a "blister" looking thing, about ¼" in diameter, where there just wasn't any coating at all on the base shell. Looked kind of like it had been there at one time, but flaked off. Other typical ones have been things like extra droplets of metal at the ends, where the halves meet. On one other I had, the tang wasn't bent right.

Looks to me like their machines are getting so old that they can't maintain them any longer, and they're not culling their defects by 100% inspection. That's way too expensive to do so it's no surprise that they're not doing it. But the nature of the problems is such that 100% post-inspection would be the only way to catch them all.

I won't use them any more either; I use F-M (Speed Pro) exclusively nowadays.