about to pull out the fire rings

I'm having mine done right now. I was thinking about doing fire rings, but with what everybody has been saying here I think I will forget about them for now.

-Josh
 
I am running fire rings and am on my 3rd set it is still not working. We are going to try to O-Ring the heads if that don't work I am screwed since we ported the crap out of these heads. We have two other customers that are running fire rings and one is the first set we did and it is holding fine but the other is having the same issues I am. All three have ARP Studs
 
Fire rings can be a great or be horrible. We have had two trucks in house that have had issues with fire rings. Most likely similar to what Abrannan had happen. After a certain amount of time and mileage the fire ring can either crack or wear a groove into the deck of the block. The cummins trucks with fire rings have the same issues. If everything is just right you get a year or two out of them. Job 2 motors are especially sensitive because there deck is softer and fire rings wear an immediate groove into the deck.

If everything is not just perfect then you can have issues. We have had a few customers who had issues with the ring not being crushed enough and the head grooves checked out, the issue IMO is the arp studs. I am not here to bash ARP so let's not go there (I think they are fine for one time use and without fire rings). Here is why I feel this way, we brought a truck in that had fire rings from ATS and ARP's. Everything was working fine. We took the heads off to port them and reassembled the truck with the original arp's and of course new fire rings. Then we went back into it (before it ran) because he decided to do rods. I measured the rings just to see and they did not crush enough, they were about .007" shy of the desired spec. I had his original rings there and measured them and they were .007"thinner. We had never touched the fire ring groove or resurfaced the head. I don't believe the arp has enough clamp load like it did on the initial torque, I feel this is because the torque spec is so high that the stud hits yield and then some, on the next retorque its even sooner. Fire rings take a high amount of clamp load to crush and I don't think the ARP delivers after multiple tries. We haven't had this issue with H-11's and multiple retorques. Any of our failures with fire rings have been from ring cracking or deck wear on the block.

We have done about 5 motors with a groove in the deck and the block and they seem to hold up just fine but again, the fire ring will eventually fail from fatigue. The new fire rings from ATS are garlock which are said to be fatigue free.

IMO if its not competition then stay away from fire rings. If you have a set of fire ringed heads that wont seal we may be able to offer an alternative rather than buying a new set of heads. PM me for more info.

Tadd
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top