Here is last thing I will post about gliders Last line kind of stops most individuals from building one.
To the original poster, sorry I helped detail your thread! You came here looking for advice and piece of mind and probably feel less informed! While engine break-in is way faster than it used to be because of tighter manufacturer tolerances, it is still required. While an engine can use excessive oil for a number of reasons, no one mentioned cylinder liner finish. All new liners are honed to achieve proper crosshatch finish and angles. The peaks and valleys of the finish help with proper oil control. The rings need to "seat" or "mate" to the liner finish to achieve the best possible seal (never perfect). In order to seal, the ring needs pressure to push down against the piston and out on the liner. Idling or light loads slow this process down. A glazed liner is one that never had a good load and the oil coats and builds up hardened in the valleys in the liner causing the ring to never mate to the liner. If you can't get a load, you might see if anyone local does have a chasis Dyno. Piece of mind sometimes doesn't come cheap.
I was going to leave this thread alone until I read this statement. Nothing could be further from the truth. New rings will never seat well if they cannot expand from the dynamics and heat that a load produces. The easiest and least expensive way of ensuring that this process occurs is through a dyno. If you want to see more evidence of this, simply talk to technicians that routinely load bank emergency power generators equipped with diesel engines that have been allowed to wet stack over time. These engines will smoke. Load banks allow precise loading of a genset. Most load banks of wet stacked cons emergency generators last 3-4 hours in duration where the engine will see a constant load upwards of 80-100% for anywhere between 1/2 to 1 hour in duration. The crap that will come out of the stack(s) is pretty amazing. At the end of the test, the rings will have been reseated and there will be no more smoke. As we know, there are engine rebuilders of every stripe willing to work on an engine. Buyer beware.
I don't agree with rings reseating on wet stacked generators. That smoke you see is all the slobber and crap that has built up in the muffler burning off. If they wet stack bad enough they'll shoot fire 2 feet out the exhaust pipe.
It starts on the cylinder walls and works it's way outward. Do you think the holes are pristine and it's just the manifold and exhaust that get dirty? This is a fruitless discussion. For the most part, we're going to build an engine the way we were taught. What works for me may not be best for you.
If anyone honestly thinks that a million mile class 8 diesel engine with a fresh rebuild will be irreparably damaged and suffer from excessive oil consumption indefinitely if the engine is put back into service without a dyno routine done first and have its first miles be empty for an extended stretch then by all means post the shop that you work for so the rest of us can be certain to avoid it.
I pour in the fluids and leave, if I am 20 miles or a thousand miles from my next load I do not care; I drive it the same way I drive an old engine with the exception of doing the first oil change at 7 thousand miles (approximately) instead of my usual target of 20,000 miles. I have never had one use oil, in fact all have used less than when they were new from the factory except 1 (that engine never used oil when new or after I inframed it) I personally own most of the engines I have rebuilt, some were for family or friends but I get to observe their performance close up for YEARS at a time and hundreds of thousands of miles per engine; my point in saying that is that my basis for confidence in my methods is not an arbitrary "I don't get comebacks". I build engines to work them until they are worn out, I know how they performed when the factory put them together and I know how they perform when I put them together; I am not saying that dyno routines harm anything but I am saying that there are far more important things to pay attention to when the work is being done that are almost always ignored by the shops that apply these "best practices". Using piston packs without pulling them apart to verify the veracity of the assembly is the source of most of the trouble, every wrist pin that walks out and gouges a liner and every oil burner that otherwise runs fine might be blamed on such ridiculous things as running empty to soon or forgoing a dyno routine but the truth is that one or more of those piston packs was assembled poorly or with the oil ring gaps too close together. You must put eyes on every component, that means assembling every hole yourself; if that is done that engine will run great for a million miles and never consume excessive oil. Those are the important steps, those steps are where the difference is made; a dyno may reveal a loose hose or oil line somewhere or in an extreme case an untorqued head or internal component but the first 10 miles on the road will reveal the same things.
I actually had a FL/detroit shop overhaul a series 60 and let it High idle checking for leaks. It burnt 4 gallons of oil in every 10k. They then put it together with aftermarket parts claiming there rings were to hard and never seated. Still used oil. Third time it went to detroit only shop. Put different Detroit pistons in. Same oil problem. After some heated conversation about parts, they installed a factory reman at there cost. That dealers dyno was down, I towed it to the next closest dyno. We only use a quart or two between oil changes now. One thing to understand is rings now are harder than of past times. Most liners wear out before the rings anymore. Its even more important to break them in properly on more modern engines than in the past. I personally feel that the lack of sulphur in the diesel fuel which had high lubricating properties contributes to a lot of this. Older mechanical engines had softer rings and more lubrication.
