Anyone had any experience using Holts Piston Seal? I phoned Holts to ask - among other things - if it's safe to use on cars with lambda sensors and catalytic converters. I couldn't get much sense out of them.
Thanks
Martin
Surely they don't still sell that rubbish?
Bores and pistons these days usually outlast the car. Unless you hole a piston through a major fault - and piston seal won't do much for that.
You know Dave, I once used some on an old Escort Estate that I had. The compression was so low that it struggled to start at all. After putting in the piston seal, it was like a new engine, and it lasted for a very long time until I got rid of the motor. Whether it's still any use with today's engines though, I wouldn't like to say.
Ask over on
uk.rec.cars.maintenance
There's some good ol' boys on that group who are very knowledgable.
Arfa
I know of plenty who used it in the old days and reported some improvment on a clapped engine - but never 'like a new engine'. But then those who used such things didn't normally have much experience of new engines anyway. ;-)
I also know of plenty who tried it and it didn't work.
Lack of compression can be down to many different things. Used to be often plain ol' wear and tear on bores or rings - but this is rare these days due to far better manufacture and oils. And if some gunge applied to the top of the piston worked so well you'd wonder why they still bother with rings...
I reckon they'll say the same.
And quite often due to burnt out valves - which piston seal wouldn't fix!
ISTR that the trick was to use a compression tester to measure the compression pressure, and then see if it was improved by squirting oil in through the plug hole. If it was, it was the pistons/rings which were leaking - and piston seal might help. If it wasn't, the fault was elsewhere - probably valves.
In them good old days, we wouldn't have trusted this either. But then there were dozens of little, nut, bolt, ring, piston, bearing, chain, belt etc. suppliers, crank grinders, head skimmers, even make you your own pistoners, all over the place; where wise old men in brown 'lab coats' could tell you the part number of any bit of any engine, size and thread of any nut or bolt, circlip, o-ring, at a glance, and then go straight to a drawer for a replacement. Then there were the sand blasters, polishers, platers...
For the price of a bottle of piston seal, a few over sized rings would have been bought and the ends carefully ground to give the right clearance. Now of course, only full sets for the entire engine are available, at a price probably not much less than a new car: and the plated bore will be beyond redemption anyway. So it's off to the breaker's yard for replacements. Heck, they've gone too. All speculative housing now.
Mind you: the engineering is now so much more reliable in the first place that we can get away with it for phenomenal mileages. Just a shame to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater somewhat when repairs are eventually needed.
Now where did I put my adjustable reamer...
S
scrappies still exist. A friend re-engined an old car from a scrappie engine where his daughter had foolishly run it with no water in it..
They do - but are nothing like as numerous as once. EU regs on fluids etc leaking into the soil made it an expensive business to get a licence.
There used to be several quite close to here - all gone.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com saying something like:
It works ok if you're punting a s**te car through an auction. Not that I did that, but a mate bought one that had it done.
Which reminds me: I never did get around to experimenting with oils instead of water, for the cooling. So many many engines have been thrown away just because the oily bit and the watery bit don't get on when a gasket or o-ring gives up...
SHi am thinking of putting some holts piston seal in my old 1985 Renault traffic it be a petrol van just like to know can I use it in a petrol engine & how do you but it in🤔 & how much 🤔
Can you really not answer those questions?
Working may also depend on how knackered is the engine. I doubt if anything like this would work if one cylinder had near zero compression.
I would guess the instructions would be on the side of the bottle or on the Holts web site.
Please read this:
You might have greater success with a thicker oil.
Or not suitable for engines built in the past 20 years so no longer any demand.
One bad cylinder can be fixed by removing the rocker arm, then it passes MOT & mpg is restored.
Are you sure about that?
I'm pretty sure there is a rule about an engine running efficiently, plus there might be injection/mixture issues.
Some people are still using an additive like Red(d)ex.
yes, seen it done. The downside is just less horses.
there weren't. I don't know but electronic injection systems might not be so happy
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