3.6 Pentastar Tear Down

[Yoinkers]

whats a hone hatch and why is it important?

[gbaumann]

whats a hone hatch and why is it important?

A cylinder hone is used to surface the cylinder wall by spinning grinding stones around the cylinder while moving them up and down. Each engine builder will have a hone specification. For example 280 grit hone moved up and down at a rate that produces hatching (scratches) at a 45 degree angle to each other. It's important to get it right for the piston rings to function properly and, among other things, to maintain compression. The surface of the cylinder wears over time and the hatch can disappear. It's good to be able to see it after 50K miles. It means there is no excessive wear in the cylinders. In fact, to me, it means little wear. It leads me to believe that they cylinder sleeves are quite good and can hold the hone for quite some time. It means the piston is well designed and the piston skirts are not coming in contact with the cylinder walls. It means the piston rings are well designed and seating beautifully in the cylinders without generating uneven wear around the cylinder. In short, it's a good thing.

[Pznivy]

Pickles, Baumann may have booted you off the pedestal around here...LOL

JL is a website by geniuses, for the rest of us. Thanks to all of you super scientific jeepers for sharing your info with the rest of us. Other sites are so much BLAH BLAH BLAH. There is not as much posted here as fast but what we do get is gold jerry, GOLD!

[2k13jk]

Looks like these 3.6s are going to be around for a while seeing that yours is held good. Are you doing anything with the factory head bolts? I was in contact with ARP head stud manufactuer he said if i can send them stock head bolts they might be able to make stronger ones to keep the cylinder heads tighter and run more boost

[gbaumann]

ARP certainly makes the bolts and studs of choice for heads. I wouldn't reuse head bolts. They have been loaded (stretched) and may not perform well if reused. As important as the head bolts are we need to consider the seal between the head and block. A good set of ARP head bolts coupled with block and head machining to accept O-ring custom gaskets that ensure a tighter condition would be my recipe for more boost.

[UselessPickles]

Multiple sources have said that the bottom end of the engine is quite strong, so I expect that you have already seen everything that had potential to show unwanted wear/damage.

I'm impressed that the crosshatch marks are still visible at the top of the cylinder. There's where the most wear happens in the cylinder.

This thread is boosting (pun intended) my confidence in the engine's ability to handle bolt-on forced induction

[Rexx19]

Multiple sources have said that the bottom end of the engine is quite strong, so I expect that you have already seen everything that had potential to show unwanted wear/damage.

I'm impressed that the crosshatch marks are still visible at the top of the cylinder. There's where the most wear happens in the cylinder.

This thread is boosting (pun intended) my confidence in the engine's ability to handle bolt-on forced induction

whats the next part to get stripped off the pentastar?

[gbaumann]

Bottom end comes off next. Want to see crankshaft, rods, pistons and bearings.

[Gunner]

A picture of how far the piston skirt comes out of the hole on bottom dead center would be interesting. If there is much it might explain why there is some blowby into the catch can. Maybe some piston rock at BDC is unseating the rings under boost. It could just be a light oil ring pack too. A fish scale pull with just the oil ring on the piston might give some useful info. When I was building motors I found that the lighter ring tensions would show power but at the expense of an increase of blow by. Some times we just added a vacuum pump and picked up power. And sometimes we just vented it out the crankcase into a catch tank. Either way is would be something to look at. This is interesting.

[Pznivy]

great thread. keep the pics coming.