Most oiling and smoke problems come with the hone job. If you just use a dingleball hone instead of taking your block out and having it honed by a good shop, you aren't going to get a great finish on the walls. If any one of the cylinders looks darker than the others, then it was burnished - meaning instead of cutting and removing material like the hone is supposed to, it pushed the material over, sort of smearing the metal. A burnished cylinder will never seal right and will always end up smoking.

As for the Total Seal rings, I can tell you they were on my customer's B16 Civic SI that qualified number one in class and won the class at a recent SCCA national event. I built his head and another shop did the block which ended up smoking. Don't know if the smoking was due to the rings or the hone job as I didn't see it.