Ross Racing pistons and 2.2L Eagle rods

Thanks to all of you for stressing out for me lol. I am touched

On a more serious side, I did notice the knocking, and after finding some metal particles on the oil I decided to not take aby chances and tear it down again. (Yes, I did lol)

The results are that it really is the pistons causing the noise. Now, I do have zzp #82 valve springs, but after seeing the pistons, I will be calling the place who sold them to me to get answers... This is BS:

Rod bearings are perfect, crank looks new, sleaves are new too, I cannot find any place where their seams to have wear of grinding except on the pistons. So that leads me to conlude that the pistons have too much clearance and its causing them to wear prematurly (this pic is after 20 miles of running not past 30mph, never went over 2500rpm.)

@Bugzilla I will be taking the head appart tonight. Quick up close inspection doesn't show any signs of rubbing from the springs, I took off the valves that has the closest spring clearance and nothing touched.

There is no crankshaft play at all either (I didn't remove the crank but you never know).

I will take the entire engine out and take it appart completly.

Back to square 1...

Well, nothing much to report for now.

The engine has been taken out of the SS, and completly dissasembled. I brought it to a performance machine shop, and they think that the slap noise was due to the piston skirt grabbing slightly at the bottom of the sleeve because the sleeve was too sharp. It wouln't affect an oem piston, but forged piston when cold with the higher clearance and longer skirt makes it happen.

So the sleeve bottoms have been rounded out. The cranks rods and pistons are getting balanced, and the deck of the block is getting leveled, bore 4 was a bit longer than bore 1, so they will be getting the deck level and straight. Same with the head. The bores are going to get honed equal also, had 2 bores a bit smaller that the other 2, so that will get taken care of. Crank will get polished journals too.

So end result is that there is no damage anywhere, everything measures in spec, piston clearance is in spec, once reassembled it should work perfect. Just 1 more week to get the machining work and balance done and its reassembly time.

Pics for your daily engine porn fix:

Mine is done.

Its installed in the SS and still getting broken in. I have ran it low rpm highway at 50mph for around 45 min, changed oil and filter, and now have about 100 miles on it with some blips on boost here and there, but still no WOT for now.

Seems like its running ok, maybe on the lean side thought, not sure yet. The fact I have a polished head makes it a bit different from the cookie cutter tune, and I might have to swap the oem ECU to get a Haltec to really get the max of this engine now.

I am heading to a race track on friday. We will see if it survives the day....

If it does, I will call this a success.
If it doesn't, I am not rebuilding my own engine again, gonna source it out.

Quote from TheRock

@iNewton so how did the track day run go?

Pretty well. The SS is now very much faster than a T-rex in a straight line.
But, I've seen that I've hit the max with stock fuel pump and had to drop PSI to around 12-13 or I would get lean in top 4th gear.

Hence now I have replaced the entire fuel setup, and learning how the Haltech Elite works...