Piston Ring End Gap

[XenosPilot]

I just honed the cylinders on my Aerovee with 42 hours on it. It had low compression numbers on the rear cylinders during the annual inspection, so I took it apart to inspect. Most of it was certainly in the valves, which I lapped, but there were also vertical scratches on the cylinder walls. FYI, the engine sat for 3 years without running. Now to the point...When I checked the ring end gaps after honing, the top compression ring was between 0.012" and 0.022" like it should be. I then measured a few of the 2nd compression rings and found them to be about 0.006".

My question is, what do I do to resolve this? Do I order different rings? Do I just file the rings until the gap is okay? Has anyone dealt with this before?

Thanks,

Stephen Layton

[Bryan Cotton]

Stephen,
That is our next step. On other engines I filed the rings to make the end gap requirements.

[XenosPilot]

I had never done this before, but I was able to use a file and get the rings to spec. yesterday in just a few minutes each. Thanks for the reply!