For a long time, people have poked fun at the DIY honing products. Some people swear by them to get their desired crosshatch angle in a home rebuild, and others outright condemn them as doing nothing of any real effect. At the end of the day here at EngineLabs, we are all about the data. Since we are close to Total Seal, and we know they have stacks of profilometers sitting around, we decided to put the ol’ dingle ball hone to the test.
Honing Science
“The idea of plateau honing is that you go through with a coarse abrasive, and ‘dig the valley’ before using a fine grit to level the peaks off,” explains Keith Jones, Total Seal’s Director of Technical Sales. As we’ve covered in the past, honing science has greatly advanced in the past decades. But, one of the key takeaways is that while advancements are made, that doesn’t invalidate the older methods.
“Ball hones can’t really change bore geometry, because they aren’t exerting enough, or the right kind of pressure on the cylinder wall,” says Jones. “What they can do is re-establish the finish of the cylinder surface. You could sit with this [320-grit ball hone] in the cylinder for two days and not even remove two-thousandths of an inch of material.”
This is our brand new 320-grit silicon carbide ball hone. Measuring 4.125 inches, the hone’s design is such that it will create the desired surface finish without worrying about excessive material removal.
Setting Up The Test
For this test, we decided to use one of the Mitutoyo SJ-210 profilometers that Total Seal sells, that they’ve specifically set up for checking the surface finish of an engine cylinder. As the guinea pig for the project, we threw Project Retro 5.0’s bare block onto a cradle and into the back of the truck, and headed down to Total Seal. The block was in the exact condition in which we got it — ostensibly a lower-mileage piece, and completely untouched since the initial teardown.
There were four measurements we…
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