The Magic Ring Test
The old Hollywood adage was “you can’t be too rich or too thin.” While Hollywood prefers to live in the land of fantasy, the last part of that recommendation holds some truth when it comes to making horsepower with internal combustion engines. The guys at Total Seal have been telling us for years that there’s hidden horsepower in most engines if you bother to lighten up the ring package, but there have always been skeptics.
Not long ago, Lake Speed Jr. was performing an engine bearing test at Shaver Racing Engines in Torrance, California, and we offered to follow along. This test had nothing to do with piston rings, but in the middle of the process of switching bearings in the 383ci small-block Chevy that is the shop’s test mule, an interesting incident occurred that led us directly to this story.
We were watching Shaver’s engine technician Keith Chrisco disassemble the connecting rod cap to change the bearings. As he removed the rod cap and pushed the piston down slightly (the engine was upside down on
