I've got my engine out and on a stand. I've got it torn down to the short block and the thing looks like it has 75,000kms on it instead of 10,000kms. I don't have any ridges in the cylinders and the honing marks are still there but the valves and the pistons are filthy. I took the valves to somebody I trust and he said it's due to the horrible tune I was running. I was thinking it may be bad guides but I trust his judgement. Anyway, here's some pics of one of the valves. If you have an opinion on this, please share

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If it was guides, I think you would notice it burning a considerable ammount of oil. I think it's just good old carbon build up.... from all of your EFI problems, I'm sure you were dumping gas for a while.

Yeah, I never saw any blue smoke. Lots of black smoke but no blue, lol.

looks like it was running rich as hell and black smoke = rich as hell - particularly if the pistons look anything like the valves

George, rich isn't really the word. The pistons are just as dirty and are completely coated except for a few tannish brown spots. It ran very badly.

Is it crud sort of build up or is it the even sort of black film you get from running to rich albeit with some tan spots. I would think oil if it's the former and mixture if it's the latter. Or both if there was remarkable oil consumption and blue smoke may not be as noticable if it's also running rich at the same time. Localized tan spot seems odd in all of that as well.

It looks like black stucko. It's not oily or filmy. It's hard and chips off. I think the tan/brown spots on the pistons may be where chunks of this crap got blown off. I'll try to get some better pics up. I'm still trying to learn how to use my new digicam and i'm not too bright to begin with

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That's carbon... oh yeah.

holy ****. thats quite a bit of carbon. did you have raw fuel spitting out the tail pipes?

Nah, it never would have made it all the way to the tailpipe due to my swiss cheese exhaust But it may be why the set of converters I put on only lasted 2 days.

Jay, can you ask your dad if it's possible to visually check for ring wash? By the end of the summer i'd lost 5-6mph trap speed.

I can ask him... but if you ask me, it's pretty unlikely that you fried the rings if you still have hone marks on the cylinders.... usually when you heat the rings up they tear up the cylinder walls pretty bad as well.

Here's some pics of the cylinders.....

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