piston rings

Simple re-ring job are getting rarer anymore. With bore and piston wear, it usually does not work for that long.

Ring grooves: It is more than free spinning of the rings in the grooves. Ring grooves get worn and dirty. They have to be cleaned, and then the ring side clearance in the grooves has to be checked. If the grooves have worn wide, the new rings will flutter in the grooves and wear rapidly. At that point, time to at least put in new pistons.

Hone: I would not bother re-ringing without a hone job. Doing it in-car, and then cleaning out the grit takes a lot of care. Glazed walls are a problem for new rings ever sealing; I'll humbly disagree with the above opinion on this matter.

Pulling: To pull the pistons, you need to pull off the head, and then pull off the oil pan. (Plan on partly lifting or jacking up the engine for this.) Then you can unbolt the rod caps and carefully take out the piston& rod assemblies.

Bore check: Once out, you need to check the bore wear. Check #1 most closely; #1 tends to wear more in inline 6's due to being at the front and cooler. If worn too much, piston rock will wear the new rings pretty quickly. Time then to pull and bore.

Ridge removal: Taking out the ring ridge in a /6 is not the most trivial job since the top ring is so far down in the bore.

OTHER OILING ISSUES: Aaaaand, before you go tooo far.......Your plug oiling may not be due to rings at all. It may simply be worn valve stems and valve stem seals. New seals can be installed easily; all you have to pull is the valve cover and use the right tools and techniques. I would definitely do the valve stem seals first to see if it clears up the plug oiling. New seals costs $15 or so, plus a new valve cover gasket. Even better, just take the head to a shop and have the valves and guides all gone over, do a valve job, and all of that will be known good.

You can usually detect bad valve stem seals by:
- Drive around and back off the throttle completely and come to a stop from medium speed and idle for 20-30 seconds.
- Then start out normally. If you consistently get a cloud of bluish oil smoke when you accelerate after decel and idling, that is usually valve stem seals.

You also may have sticking oil rings; that will show up in erratic clouds of oil smoke. Have you had much fuel contamination in the oil due to a carb leak or a leaking fuel pump diaphragm?

You can try loosening up sticky rings; may work or may not. Get a pint of Sea Foam or Rislone. Idle the engine and than take it to a fast idle by hand; dribble at least half of the pint of fluid veeery sloooowly down the carb while modulating the throttle by hand to keep it running. It will take a few minutes to work a half pint of this through the engine. You will get a huge storm cloud of smoke in this process; it might loosen up a stuck ring, or not if it is really bad, but the smoke part is fun. It will clean intake valves pretty good. Then put the rest in the crankcase and run it. Stuck rings can loosen if not bad, but if they are really badly varnished, there is not much hope.