Monday, Sep 29, 2003 at 13:58
Hi Peter, the problem stems from a few areas, Firstly the material of the bores and rings can cause problems with the rings bedding in , if the rings don't bed properly then you get accentuated wear which can make any
bore 'out of round' or piston sizing problems worse. The first sign of trouble is a light piston slapping sound which only gets worse along with the oil consumption problems. I was told that during the trouble shooting of this in the early days holden decided to build a new engine exactly to tolerence to do durability tests on, apparently they went through 3 new blocks and 8 sets of new pistons to acheive a motor with the correct tolerances. The new pistons they are fitting have small squares of a bonded moly style substance on the sides of the skirts (similar to the jet-hot style friction coatings) But i would see this as a temporary band aid fix only (just my guess for any layers out there!!) .
If i was having a gen3 fixed i would push for a new block pistons rings and bearings at least.
The saving grace of the engine is that if you take real care to bed the rings in properly using a mineral oil for the first 10k then you shouldn't have too many problems. One car i worked on(ss) was used by a car nut as a tow rig for his show car and as such was often under high load low rev style driving, this helped his rings bed in really
well and his ss ran as sweet as a button even with 70k on it. No problems!!
It is a very recognised service & warranty issue so every dealer in the country has no excuse to claim ignorance.
Disclamer ; the
views expressed above are the
views of the author only and represent the general information presented to him while in the employ of gmh.Life is short- but there's always time for a yarda.
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