Look what happened to my friend with his 4G Prelude VTEC, 1994, all happened in Europe.

His oil consumption was about 1L/1000km (1quart/600miles) so he wanted to make a rebuild at his friend's shop. OK, he bought all the parts as rings and valve seals, all from Honda for big money and bringed all the stuff to the mechanic. The man did the rebuilt, but when my frined first started, the lude really smoked with white color. The mechanic said it is ok, you have to drive with it and it will be ok. What happened next - the oil consumption was unbelievable 1L per 20-50km (1q/15-35miles)! All this followed with huge white smoke. My friend said OK, I will believe you and I'll try it. He has driven about 3000km (2000miles), the white smoke was still there and the oil consumption has "improved" to 1L/50km.

That was really unbelievable. The mechanic said that he has done everything perfectly and that "it is ok". My friend couldn't get the money or anything back. The ride with his lude was not fun anymore. My friend was really heart-broken and didn't know what to do. He couldn't simply sell the lude with smoking like this. Everyone told him that there must be something wrong and that it is not ok. My friend hoped that he didn't buy bad rings, but was not sure.

So one day, he estimated that we will try to open the engine and check what is wrong. We hoped that the rings were badly put on or put in reverse, because the oil consumption was really big. We opened the engine (head off) and WTF, all seemed to be ok. The rings were put perfectly. This was really bad news for us - we all hoped it will be the rings. The plugs were all covered by oil:




Anyway, we tried to remove the rings form the pistons and when looked in detail, the ring that seats between the two oil rings was cut!!! We had some old rings to compare, look at these pics:




What the f*ck could that mechanic be? These rings were cut on all the pistons. I remember when we were rebuilding our last H22, the rings went to the cylinder really bad and we also thought that we bought some bad "too big" rings. While we got them in, the mechanic didn't and simply cut them! It's sure that the high oil burning was because of this.

However this was not the last surprise that day. When we looked into the cylinder, there was some deep scratch in, the same was on the piston and bearing:





Was that mechanic mad? It looked like he made the rebuild in some sand or stone pit. So we bought one new piston and all new bearings. We had only to rehone the cylinder, because there was not enough money to do anything else (my friend had to pay two rebuilds).




Yes, the scratch is still there, but not so deep and sharp.



We are going to finish this rebuild tommorow. I will report our result to you.