Cylinder Honing

Following the topic on using muriatic acid for removing piston deposits from nikasil cylinders, next step is cylinder honing. 

Cylinder honing can easily be done at our workshop and that's very useful, especially when there is no access to industrial tools and/ or machine shops. A honing tool can be sourced quite easily and there are two types of them, with hone balls or honing stones. For our two stroke engines only the pictured one with honing stones is suggested. This type of honing tool uses flat stones that are spring loaded from the tool shank. It is suggested to use 100mm honing stones or bigger as they come in a variety of lengths for various uses. 

The honing tool should be used in conjunction with an electric drill. The tool shank is flexible so there is no need to precise position the electric drill with the cylinder. Compress the honing stones to insert them in the cylinder but first... 

...ensure that both the tool and cylinder are very well oiled. Any type of thick and/ or machine oil will do. Use low rpms on the electric drill and a quick motion of back and forth movements on the honing tool to achieve a 45 degree cross hatch pattern. The whole process should take a few seconds only. 

And here is a photo with the end result. In the third and final topic, I will show a simple way of measuring cylinder to piston clearance. The aforementioned clearance will let as know how far we can go with cylinder honing and it will be the end of the "Low Budget" cylinder repairing article. 

Have fun and keep two strokes alive!