It was all going to be so perfect. We were going to re-ring one cylinder in Goliath’s 292ci straight six and then it would be off to the shop to have the rotted cab floors repaired. That pipe dream ended when we popped the number two piston out, found a chunk of ring land missing, removed the number one piston just because and found the top ring broken in half. We’re now going to re-ring all the pistons and replace the number two slug. Fear not, the bearings are staying.

If you missed the mayhem leading up to this point you can read all about it in Part One, but even with busted rings, and pistons, we managed to get some other stuff done during Part Two. Mainly rebuilding the cylinder head, lapping the valves, and replacing valve seals so it’s ready to be bolted back on. That was the happy news. Pulling the motor apart, one jug at a time, is the sad news.

As you’ll see in the photo gallery, the number two piston had a top ring that was shattered into a million pieces. That was good reaffirmation for us that we had diagnosed our compression issue properly and we’d just be doing a hone and re-ring on that cylinder. As we were pushing the piston up from the bottom we heard what sounded like ball bearings hitting the deck of the block. It was actually the pieces of ring falling out. As we headed topside to see what was what we noticed that the ring was busted up, and that a chunk of the piston’s bottom ring land was missing. Awesome! Now we’re going to be replacing pistons.

Because we’re curious types and we’d been drinking, we decided to pop the number one piston out of its hole and found the top ring busted in half. We proceeded to yank it, hone it, and put the rings we had intended to use on #2, on #1, and stick it back in the hole.

As we started looking for a replacement piston we lucked out when our friends at Then and Now Automotive in Weymouth, Ma scored us a std bore replacement piston and a set of rings that were probably made in the early 1960’s. Vintage parts rule!

As we like to do around here, we’re going to tell the story through photos and captions in a sweet gallery. Click the link below and see all the gory details. As the truck sits now, we’re waiting to pop the rest of the pistons, finish the hone and ring job and get it back together again.

The mechanical gods are making us work for this one! Our one cylinder rebuild just grew by 500%, but we’re having too much fun to be pissed off about it.

Gallery: Project Goliath Motor Rebuild Update