I've been beating on my stock bottom end for a while now, and I may give even a little worse hell before I get around to getting the good bottom end assembled and installed. So with that in mind, I was hoping some of you might be able to tell me what to watch for or listen for to let me know that things have gone bad?

Thanks!

 

Smoke/blowby from the breather and the usual blue smoke from exhaust.

 

Take a look at your plugs

 

In a really bad scenerio, it will have a severe lack of power, and emit huge clouds of blue or white smoke. My friend beat his LS for 2 days on a poor basemap, cracked all 4 ringlands to smithereens, and it would barely move under its own power at WOT. He's glad a neighbor didn't call the fire department.

 

One or more signs I would think... bad compression/ leakdown test, smoke from breather, sudden change in how much vac it pull at idle warmed up, wrx like sound to the idle, burning oil/ smoking, obviously stuff like power loss, etc

 

VERY helpful replies, thanks guys! ! !

So basically cracked/broken ring lands pretty much always means lost ring seal then, is what I'm getting from this. In other words, when it happens, you KNOW something is wrong, right?

FWIW, I don't think I have any of this going on (yet). Sounds like I can keep on pouring the coal to this sucker for a little while longer then I guess. . .

 

if your car sounds like a subaru lol, well mines did when i cracked the ringlands on a piston . was just runnin on 3 cyclinders , 10psi compression compared to 195 on the other 3.

you will know its broke .