Re: My flathead started knocking.
Ok guys, found the problem.
Small piece of a piston ring worked its way to the combustion chamber. In cylinder number 7 as I suspected! A minor score on the cylinder wall. So, I know I will be rebuilding it down the road, but coming up in a few weeks, I'm building a new shop so I can get work like this done! I'll be very tied up working on my shop for a long time.
Now get this, I think this ring broke back in December! In fact, over Christmas I started up all my old cars on a nice warm day to run them for a few minutes. The old meteor fired right up, but it hammered and banged so loud, I thought somebodys cat was in the belts! I shut it down immediately, restarted it and it was perfectly quiet until this week. I put over 100 miles on it in that time. Crazy!
This engine rebuild project will have to go on the back burner for now. However, I'm tempted to slap it back together so I can at least move it out of the garage and back into storage. I've rebuilt a number of engines in my day, but never seen a piston ring work its way out like that.
So what causes this, corrosion on the piston from being parked from 1965 until 2021, and it finally let loose after 5 years of driving over 18000 miles?
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