chaos.lrk.ar.us!dave.williams (Dave Williams)
hotrod  14 Mar 93
- I have here a set of Total Seal gapless rings for a friend's 2000 Ford.
  There were a few interesting things about them -
-  first, they're pretty much a standard set of rings with the second
   ring machined to accept a spring steel extra ring that looks pretty
   much like a piece of an oil ring set.
-  second, the box comes with a Total Seal sticker, kinda nice,
   considering you just dropped $58 for a four cylinder ring set.
-  third, the box also comes with a piece of hard candy, co-extruded
   in red, white, and blue, bearing the Total Seal logo.  AB swiped
   the candy, so I can't report what it tastes like.
-  fourth, the instructions tell you to oil the cylinder walls only
   *very* lightly.  They don't want you to oil the rings at all,
   and claim if you do they'll never seat.  I always tend to slather
   oil all over the rings in a fresh bore job, usually Mobil 1
   synthetic, which is my usual assembly lube, or sometimes Yamalube R
   two stroke oil, which is intended to burn away without leaving
   gunk all over the place.
- You don't hear much about gapless rings in the US, but they're a big deal 
  over in Europe, where rodders are scrounging a bit harder for horsepower. 

[email protected] (Dave Williams)
fords  30 Jun 1994
- -> rings.  I just seemed to be "new" hyped up technology that we could
  -> not justify on the dyno.  Maybe you need to use different clearances,
- Naw, the Total Seals have been around for a long, long time.  They're a 
  really neat idea, but whether they're necessary for a properly built race 
  engine is debatable.  Which is, of course, why everyone doesn't run them. 
- It's easy to get carried away worrying about the end gaps.  "Look, there's a 
  HOLE there, and all my power is going down into the oil pan!" That's why the 
  gaps are sized so that they pretty well close up when hot - the rings grow a 
  little.  Voila!  No more hole. 
- -> have tried both.  We dynoed both and checked the leakage with the TS
- That's something lots of manuals and articles tend to sort of gloss over - 
  COLD leakdown doesn't mean much.  For the leakdown test to be valid, the 
  engine needs to be checked as close to operating temperature as possible.