Stocker

If the piston rings still give adequate sealing, leave them. If the engine is very low-miles and you can't test the ring sealing, leave them. Otherwise, replace them. You have opened a can of worms now and it only gets more expensive the closer you look at your used engine parts! Measure the cylinders. IF the bore is still acceptably round and the taper is not too bad, you can just slap a new set of moly rings on and go. If using chrome faced rings you'll have to re-hone the cylinders regardless of condition to get good seating of the rings.

A bad tune or burning oil will crud up the combustion chambers. Good combustion (which the grooves would help, as would a good tune-up) and non-leaking valve stem seals will keep the chambers clean. A working PCV valve (do you have them in France?) or an air/oil separator on the PCV line to the intake manifold also helps.

Now for the valves. You can use a deep-well socket to remove them, but you must be brave. Choose a socket large enough to press on the spring and allow the keepers to fall free. Put some corrugated card board on your bench to protect the valves, then put the head right-side up on the bench. Place the socket on a valve spring, and strike it smartly with a rubber mallet. The spring compresses, and the valve moves a bit slower. Done properly the valve keepers fall free inside the socket. Done wrong the keepers go flying or they stay in place. Done horribly wrong and the intake valves will bend wink1.gif

Once you get the valves out, you will run your fingers down the inside (short side radius) of the runners and feel how awful Hyundai left the casting/machining. You will note the carbon buildup in the exhaust runners. You will take pictures to show us all (hint, hint). Then you will need to look up my head port/polish thread . . . smile.gif

AcN

Man, risking to bend the valves with the socket is deadly in France... I mean, nobody got spare parts for Hyundai here laugh.gif (well, it doesn't sell much over here so we kinda get screwed because people prefer german or french cars even when they don't have the money, always yelling "asian cars cost an eye to maintain" etc... french cars can die at 36Km... I saw that at work a couple of weeks ago hahaha)

I got a PCV valve, and doing the DIY about cleaning it wink1.gif (actually, from all the DIY i've seen, we kinda have the exact same car over here)
So do you think it will still run well with the stocl ECU ?

I guess i'm gonna start the grooves on sunday smile.gif

Stocker

It should run

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Most reports I have seen are much smoother idle, better fuel economy, and more torque at low engine speeds. Please take pictures and let us know how it runs when you finally get it all back together.

I wouldn't sweat bending the valves too much. Consider they are 4mm steel rods vs. your tapping of a rubber mallet. Then again, I KNEW my intake valves were bent already. I can't blame you for not wanting to chance it! Look up 'DIY valve spring compressor' on Google and you'll see that you don't have to *buy* anything much besides some scrap metal.

AcN

okay so the grooves were done on sunday by my best friend who didn't really have a steady hand at that time, but still good enough overall. Piston surface were cleaned, same with the head cylinder actually. The valves are smoother and i can finally read the A8 on it smile.gif So now it looks great.

Haven't done much since then. Might reassemble all of this and pull out the old engine after that smile.gif

Ni pics btw, sorry about that, i'll try to do some if I don't forget my camera

About cleaning the PCV oil drain, i did it. But there was a kind of silicon joint which appeared to be made with a silicon pistol. Can anybody confirm this ? because when i removed it, the joint was tearing in pieces so i gotta replace it.

Regit

"There are several astonishing first-hand reports if you google it up, which was enough for me"
when I first heard of this years ago I looked the grooves up and all I got was long term fails? I race at the track with 7 sec cars and have had many convos about this, every time I bring up Singh Grooves, no one has ever heard of it,and/or they think its dumb,and I usually end up looking like a liar or an idiot ... to each their own,but I would never carve up my engine.

03tibe85

Old school racers are old dogs that don't like new tricks. Singh grooves work best on normally aspirated fuel injected motors that have the ability to modify ignition timing and air fuel ratio. The benefits of the grooves on a forced inducted engine haven't really been effectively measured yet, that I can see.

Stocker

AutomotiveBreath I think is the username of a guy who does headwork for racers who pay other people to do high-power engine building. He says it does good things for his customers' engines . . . Idling a full-tilt-boogie race V8 at 500RPM being one of the more astonishing. There are some VERY long message board threads out there with lots of back and forth between users, skeptics, and the ignorant. I think it's not something that will be settled until somebody drops a HUGE wad of cash on instrumentation and dyno runs. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, not too many dyno graphs. There are also alot of people who combine the grooves with increased compression, which I will be doing. I have yet to find one person who said "I did it and it sucked" but I've seen lots of 'I did it and it's great' which is good enough for me to act. One of the members at RDTiburon.com (I forget who) grooved his head and increased compression, and reported good running quality on 87 octane.

03tibe85

Know of any people with Forced Induction that has done it? I'd be curious about the results.

Stocker

Bal at RDT had a poor tune that eventually detonated a piston to pieces under boost. He grooved the head, replaced the piston, reported that his detonation went away.