Best method for seating the rings

[Anthony]

Excellent discussion, thanks. One of my engines has the total seal 2nd ring set, purchased years ago, the other engines, all have been built with the standard design.

What I was told by somebody is that "a engine builder building mopar hemi engines using the total seal rings" has had some durability problems, wearing the cylinders excessively. I don't know if they were the gapless top or second ring sets, as I was investigating whether or not to use gapless on my current engine rebuild, and if so, whether to use total seal's gaples top or second ring set vs. C&A's Z gap set.

Originally Posted by eschaider

We used the gapless rings for blown alky applications. The car seemed to mph slightly better but not enough to say the ring was a required component to win. What we did like was low measured leak and the ductile iron second that was essentially impervious to breakage. It didn't need the gapless technology to be ductile but at the time it was one way to get ductile second rings. Our top ring was a stainless .017 Dyke ring that was cerrtainly not gapless.

The two piece ring will flutter before a single piece ring will flutter. Thats probably important to the F1 crowd but not to a blown alky engine and certainly not to a Cobra engine at any rpm they will reach. I'm not persuaded they are an essential component in a engine build for a Cobra.

By the way having said all that, my engine has a 1.5mm stainless top ring and a 1.5mm TotalSeal gapless second ring with a high tension 3mm oil. I did it not because I thought hundreds of horsepower were at risk, I did it because I've had 20 years of good experiences with the rings.

..... No matter what you pick you're not loosing boatloads of horsepower.

Yeah, I think no matter what you use, a good set of rings will be fine, whether they are gapless or not.

I had maybe thought if using total seals gapless design, to use the top gapless set, as the second ring set has a bad rap for flutter, in high rpm or engine scavenging situations, like dry sump or high efficiency exhaust systems. But wondered if there were any issues with the top gapless rings as well.