Honing a Saturn's cylinder walls.

Took some time after work tonight to hone the cylinders on the Saturn's engine. I debated whether or not to do this. I finally decided to do it so that it would de-glaze the cylinders walls and therefore help the new rings I installed to seat better. I used a ball hone and it worked great. Here is the ball hone that I used. I put some really thin oil on the cylinder walls before I ran the hone in them.

 You don't want a super fast speed when doing this. I set my drill to spin around 1000 RPM or so and it seemed to work out pretty good. You want to start the hone spinning before you insert it into the bore. I also found that if I went up and down fairly slow at first and then increased the speed at the end I got better cross hatch marks and a cleaner cylinder. You need to make sure you pull the hone out also while it is spinning or you will scratch your cylinder walls. Your cross hatch marks should be about 45 degrees with each other as an end product. I did this with the crank still installed so I put some plastic sheet to cover the crank so I would keep out any grit from the crank bearings. It would definitely be easier to remove the crank before doing this but I didn't want to mess with removing it. This is a super low dollar budget build so I opted to keep the crank in.

 Here are the cylinder walls. They look pretty good.

Here are all 4 just after I honed them. I still need to clean the walls now to get all the grit off them.

To clean the cylinders out I flipped the block over because the crank is still in it and washed them out upside down. Here it is ready to be cleaned.

 The best thing to clean the walls after honing is super hot water and laundry detergent soap. I opted for tide. I just got a bucket full of steaming hot water with tide and I used a brush that fit inside the cylinders and scrubbed them out. I did it until the brush came out clean. I did all 4 cylinders this way.

I then got a bucket of clean hot water and rinsed out the cylinders with some paper towels and made sure they came out clean also. I finished it off with a coating of motor oil to keep the cylinder walls from rusting from the water. Here it is all done and ready for the pistons to be installed.

 Hopefully in the next couple of days I will have time to install the pistons. Here they are ready to go in with all the new rings installed and the 1 new piston to replace the damaged one.

The goal for this week is to get the engine all back together and ready to be installed in the car. I think it can be done. It will most likely take until Saturday but that is the goal. I am going to take the cylinder head into work tomorrow and clean it up and see if I can get it to seal better. Keep watching to see if the goal is accomplished.