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LTF and STF fuel correction codes P0170, P0175, P0172, P0174

Ford gearbox makes a friction or click

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Repair the fuel level sensor: the fuel gauge does not work?

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Building customer loyalty: why oil changes are important

Building customer loyalty in any business is challenging. Getting customers back to the car repair shop is the most difficult task for car owners. If a store can crack this code, they will seize current and future repair and maintenance opportunities. The only inherent opportunity for each vehicle to increase customer loyalty is engine oil and functional fluid services.

In this one-hour webinar, our experts will discuss how they can establish oil change and vehicle maintenance plans to maintain customer return rates and help maintain healthy profit margins.

Speaker John Stotz, Senior Marketing Manager of Sheng Brand Lubricants. Andrew Markel, Content Director, ShopOwner

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Underhood Service’s goal is repair shops, where 50% or more of its revenue comes from the service and repair of under-hood systems. The increasing knowledge and capital required to keep up with technological advancements has prompted these shopkeepers to focus on under-hood systems while also providing preventive maintenance services for most major vehicle systems. By subscribing, you will receive the ShopOwner digital magazine (12 times a year), which contains articles from the Underhood Service and Underhood Service e-newsletters (twice a week). Today is ready for you to access digital editions, competitions, news and more!

Underhood Service’s goal is repair shops, where 50% or more of its revenue comes from the service and repair of under-hood systems. The increasing knowledge and capital required to keep up with technological advancements has prompted these shopkeepers to focus on under-hood systems while also providing preventive maintenance services for most major vehicle systems. By subscribing, you will receive the ShopOwner digital magazine (12 times a year), which contains articles from the Underhood Service and Underhood Service e-newsletters (twice a week). Today is ready for you to access digital editions, competitions, news and more!

ByUnderhood Service Staff Writers on Mar 31, 2021

High temperatures under the hood, increased power demand, and vibration can damage the alternator or starter. Sponsored by ACDelco.

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The relationship between piston ring and cylinder bore finish is critical to engine efficiency.

The piston ring performs a very difficult job. They are subjected to scorching temperatures and extreme pressures, and they constantly rub the cylinder wall back and forth, thousands of times per minute. Nonetheless, these rings are still expected to seal combustion and vacuum, prevent blowby, control fuel consumption, keep cylinder walls lubricated, cool pistons, and last but not least, lasting almost forever. this

Appropriate lubrication for any part, anywhere can be simply described by the four Rs-the right oil, the right place, the right time, and the right quantity. The right oil means it has the right viscosity and additive package for the application, and you must put it in the right place at the right time and in the right amount. 

Speaking of piston rings, you have a compression ring, which is hermetically compressed, but you also have an oil control ring. Sometimes, the second ring in a traditional three-ring package is only compressed by about 20%. Although it is called a compression ring, it is actually 80% oil control.

Lake Speed ​​Jr of Total Seal said: "I really saw the situation in terms of engines and piston rings. What I saw was a gap." Four rupees. In the past 15 years, the availability and choice of having the right oil has increased substantially. There are many very good oils now. However, this is only one of four rupees. If you don't put it where it should be when you need it, and it's enough, then it doesn't matter how good the oil is, it doesn't matter. " 

When you think of oil, people tend to think of it as a lubricant, but as far as piston rings are concerned, it is actually doing two things. Not only does it lubricate the ring, because it is a lubricated part, but it is also a seal. 

"I like to say that oil is a gasket," Speed ​​said. "There are irregularities. Oil is the gasket that fills these irregularities to form a seal. The piston ring can match the hole at the macro level, but not at the micro level. The seal is oil. It is the ring and the ring platform. And the gasket between the ring and the cylinder wall. It is important to have enough oil there to make that gasket."

The size of rings today also contributes to the relationship between oil and rings. By using 1mm, 1mm, and 2mm ring sets, it also allows changes in the piston design.

"In many cases, this allows for an uninterrupted oil ring groove," Mahler's Joe Melish said. "This change allows the design to use more flexible rings, and improves horsepower and torque, because the 1mm, 1mm, and 2mm ring groups are more flexible and can adhere to possible inconsistencies in the cylinder wall."  

Joe said it would be helpful to think of the piston and ring as a unit acting as a pump. If the pump can achieve the best and consistent seal, it will bring the best performance. This is achieved through the use of a toroidal design, and because less material is used, there is less potential contact with the cylinder.

Over the years, another thing Lake Speed ​​Jr. has noticed is that fuel is the enemy of oil. One of the requirements for engine oil is to try to deal with the fact that combustion leakage and fuel dilution occur in the oil. 

"When I checked the oil sample, it was the most worn oil sample," Speed ​​said. "The only time you see severe wear without a lot of fuel is a component problem, which is very rare. More often than not, the fuel kills the oil."

The viscosity of fuel is lower than that of oil. The most important characteristic of any lubricant is viscosity. This is your main protection mode. When the fuel dilution is high, it will reduce the viscosity and reduce the lubricating properties of the oil. This goes back to the piston ring problem. 

"Today's rings are steel because steel is a better material than cast iron," he said. "It can withstand more heat. It is more malleable. People mistakenly think that the ring needs to be strong and very hard. It is not a structural part of the piston. The wrist pin is the pillar of the piston and needs to be strong and strong. The ring is a seal. You You don’t put a cast iron gasket between the cylinder block and the cylinder head to seal it. No, you put something soft. It may be multiple layers of steel, but it must be consistent. The seal needs to be consistent.” 

With a steel ring, because it has greater elastic strength, it can move, its ductility is better, and it is more capable of working as a piston ring than cast iron. It should be noted that when you use steel rings, you do not have the porosity that cast iron has. 

"This porosity allows it to hold oil, which brings us back four rupees-the right oil, the right place, the right time, and the right amount," he said. "The pores of old-fashioned rings can hold oil, so the oil can not only be used as a seal, but also lubricate the ring. This makes honing and the finish of the cylinder wall not so precise, so people's holes will be very rough. 

"For the chrome-plated ring, because chrome is very hard, it needs to be embedded with a rough surface, because chrome has irregularities. What have you done to adapt to it? You have a very rough hole surface to wear the chrome, so it may Will wear out. This is why the chrome ring engine takes a long time to run in."

Going back to the whole idea of ​​the right oil, the right place, the right time, and the right quantity, those old-school rings are porous and can do part of the work for you. The surface finish may fail due to tempering because it is forgiving. Today's steel ring is a better material, after gas nitriding or PVD coating, there is no oil retention. Now your oil retention must be in the hole, so now the surface finish of the hole is critical.

"You have to understand numbers and terms such as Ra, Rpk, Rvk, Rk-you better get used to these terms because you have to understand them," Speed ​​said. "As most people know, Ra is the average roughness. The problem is that as far as Ra is concerned, peaks and valleys are exactly the same thing, except that one is painful to sit up, and the other is fine. Ra alone is not enough. 

"To make it more complicated, in today's world, we still have many different materials to drill holes. In the past, everyone had gray cast iron. Today, you have gray cast iron, compacted graphite iron (CGI), aluminum , Alusil, etc. All these materials are different from a chemical point of view. If you use the same abrasive and run the same abrasive at the same load and at the same speed, pass four different hardness materials and materials with different chemical properties. , You will get four different surface finishes. 

"This is probably the most learned lesson I have learned in the past 12 months, which is to see different people use the same product with different successes and failures, and don't understand what is missing-this is the surface finish. This is the difference The reason for the inconsistent surface finish is that the bulk material, the hole material itself, is different. From one manufacturer to another, there are many differences even in hardened casing." 

Engine manufacturers must deal with these variables, from gray cast iron blocks to high nickel blocks, to all-aluminum blocks cast with sleeves and billets with sleeves. You must also consider how big these sleeves are. How much did you take out of your sleeve? Are they skinny? Are they thick? All these will not only lead to irregular differences in surface finish, but also lead to hole deformation. 

"These are the challenges we saw that made it interesting," Speed ​​said. "The great thing about engines is that engines are always complex things. None of them are the same. They run in completely different environments, so there is no magic answer. We all hope we can go directly to Smokey's book Or Grumpy’s book, and then turn to page 15. The answer is here, do it. I hope it’s that simple, but it’s not. That’s the fun of it."

These different materials have also prompted piston manufacturers to increase the use of coatings on piston skirts and piston crowns because they can effectively reduce component wear.

"Most of the piston sets we provide have GRAFAL in the skirt, which reduces friction and acts as a cushion when the piston and cylinder come into contact," Maylish said. "Phosphate coating actually benefits the pin holes and ring grooves until the engine oil system reaches working pressure. The benefit is that it helps prevent wear and micro-welding. We live in an era of pursuit of performance, which promotes new Concept, design and methods of protecting pistons."

For piston rings manufactured by Total Seal, they are suitable for many different applications because there is no single solution.

"We have an army or a technology library," Speed ​​said. “There is no material, no coating, no design. The ideal choice for a turbo diesel engine is different from the ideal choice for a Honda Clone kart engine. We start with the application, and then let the application determine the material, coating and design. Everything It’s all about efficiency. When you need efficiency, we can help.”

When it comes to maximizing efficiency, understanding friction, wear and lubrication is essential. In fact, 40% of the friction in the engine is the friction between the piston ring and the cylinder wall. If you want to improve the efficiency of the engine, the first thing you should consider is the piston ring assembly. 

"This is why we have reduced from 5/64 rings in production engines to 2.8 mm rings in production engines today because of this efficiency," Speed ​​said. 

Although no piston ring style is suitable for all engine applications, Lake does admit that the combination of technologies in the diamond-polished intake ring offers a lot of hope. 

"The diamond finish makes the ring smoother," he said. "Although you need that roughness on the cylinder wall to hold the oil, you don't want the roughness on the ring because if you try to seal two things together, you will be blown away. Blowing means more Low efficiency and more oil pollution-these are all bad things. The Ra value of standard production rings may be in the range of 13-14. Finished diamond rings will drop to close to 2, and definitely less than 6. They are true Very smooth. Just by smoother surface treatment, this in itself can create a better ring seal." 

Rings in today's environment cannot isolate static tension. In the past, when you had a huge ring and a low compression rate, the tension of the ring was enough to form a seal. In a 17:1 compression engine that produces more than 2,500 psi cylinder pressure, you cannot eliminate tension. 

"The reason for this is the air pressure behind the ring, which is why people like Grumpy Jenkins place gas ports on the piston to let the gas travel a shorter path to the back of the ring to use the ring dynamically," he said. "By putting the gas port on the ring instead of the piston, now you don’t have to punch a hole in the piston, and you can regain real estate. Now, I can have a gas port near the valve relief bag. I don’t have to worry about this port too much. Close to the bag. I can have an evenly distributed number of ports on the ring, and now the valve bag can be deeper to get more valve lift or whatever I need to do. 

"In addition, since the detergent additives in the engine oil are effective for steel but not as effective for aluminum, I can keep the piston rings clean for a longer period of time so that the ports will not become dirty and will not become dirty over time. And it fails. And because I distribute them evenly, I don’t need that much port capacity. It has no holes. Also, the ring is always rotating, so the gas pressure doesn’t just point to one location. It moves around, so It wears the holes evenly and wears less." 

According to Lake, engine manufacturers can apply the benefits of gas delivery to a wider range of engines than before. These rings provide excellent ring sealing, which means higher efficiency and extended engine life. It is the most widely used piston ring technology.

This article is provided by Engine Builder.

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