It is my opinion that the amount of housing wear caused by any seal is in direct relationship with the amount of lubrication the housings get. Many people feel that because they have a functioning (or not malfunctioning) OMP that they are safe. This just is not the case, I have had many cars come in where the oil injectors have failed, either completely clogged or blowing in both directions. Either issue drastically reduces the amount of lubrication the housings get.

I have torn apart engines with RA, ALS, Atkins, Mazda, etc and not one of them consistently wears housings more than the other.

For example, here is an engine that had a brand new set of housings when built with less than 4K with ALS seals, this customer was told by his previous builder to run 4 oz per tank (1/4 oz/ga) without any OMP:



I have pictures of Atkins 3mm seals wearing out the housings in the same way. The 2mm are so soft that they split in half under any type of real boosted power, destroying everything, so the wear does not matter.

I took my own engine apart in 5K miles intervals ( for 20K) and were no signs of wear. I started with the original RA seals and swapped to the super seals when they came out a few years ago. This testing was done on my single turbo 93 FD pushing 25+psi. I originally built it with new housings, when I pulled it this last time for the 20B and disassembled, the housings still looked new. My 20B also has super seals and brand new housings.

We have also opened up a 50K mile engine that we built for a customer several years ago, that decided he want porting this time, housings were completely usable, no abnormal wear at all.

We also have a customer that we built an engine in 2007 with Super Seals that daily drives his FD and he has put over 100K on since, it is still running perfectly.

Now I have torn apart engines with RA seals that did show wear, typically those people thought it was safe to run 1/4 or 1/2 oz/ga premix on cars that were making 400-500whp with WI. This is one of the reasons we always recommend no less than 1oz/ga.

I have not seen the wear from Goopy seals yet because they are too new, I am will to guess that I will see similar results.

The RA seals are the more reliable that I have found, they can withstand the abuse of engines making 600+whp without shattering and do not cause any more wear that any other seal.

Lubrication of the seals and housings is key for the longetivity of any engine regardless of the seals used.

 

Do you recommend 1oz per gallon?

 

He will fix the motor if it drops in compression? Get Steve to test it so you have a baseline

 

.

 

Most decent (TCW-3) premixes I've seen will recommend at least 1oz per gallon. The Quicksilver brand (a real nice Outboard/Maritime premix) recommends something like 13oz for 10 gallons if I remember correctly. Each brand will have different recommendations on the bottle.

Obviously if you go WAY overboard with the premix then you could have problems, due to displacing fuel, but anywhere between 1oz/gal and 1.3oz/gal should be fine... I'd err on the side of putting slightly too much in (by an ounce or two) as opposed to putting too little in.

 

I liked the Quicksilver premix as well because it didn't smoke when warmed up even at 50:1, the engine looked clean on the inside and it was cheap at Kmart in gallons.

I had high hopes it would mitigate the wear of these non compatible seals.

Which, in reading how few miles OTHERS have gotten out of the rotor housings on RA seals I guess it did.

But in the end they still looked like the housings posted above.

 

on the fence, to me it seems once the RA seals start to gouge then it goes downhill quickly. if you can keep the seals from digging in then you may be lucky and have them last for a good long while.

but many people have claimed to premix 1oz per gallon and still had poor results from the seals.

think about a tiny sliver of metal in an engine bearing, it goes around once and galls the passage rolling metal around, metal gets taken off and moved to the spot next to it, galling that spot and starting a chain reaction eventually wearing the shaft and bearing to the point of seizure. unfortunately in rotary engines their rotary motion could be compared to a bearing failure.

 

Quick question on the Premix: would having greater than 1.3oz/gal cause it to not stay alive and buck like crazy?

 

not likely but it will spit out your plugs quicker in fouling them.

 

I've always premixed 1ozper 1gal, without OMP. RA seals still gouged the S5 JSPEC rotor housings. To be fair, there is a slight posibility that one of the tuners refilled the gas tank, and did not noticed that I was premixing.

Its one of those things that I will never know.

For those running without OMP, do you suggest running 1oz/1gal at a min, or more?

 

I would stick with what your premix manufacturer suggests, there should be a chart on the bottle, as each brand will be slightly different. However I would def not run any less than 1oz/gal if you're running without an OMP.

 

for the most part i've always suggested 1oz/gallon and never had anyone with dropping compression numbers.

 

I could not tell you what happened with your specific engine as I did not build it. I can say that I have been building 50+ engines/year for 8-9 years with the RA seals and have not had any issues. Some of the customers with 8-9 year old engines still own the cars and we are still modifying them.

The amount of premix varies depending on power and level of boost, but I would never run less than 1 oz/ga, if you are consistently pushing 20psi with water/meth then more should added.

If you have excess bearing wear or running super high rpms, there is a chance that your rotors are making contact with the housings. This would cause scoring that is not the fault of any apex seals. I have also seen turbos that have eaten the compressor wheel, this results in similar housing wear as what was posted on page 1 from the fine pieces of aluminum being sent through the engine. These are just a few situations I have seen in engines not using RA seals that yield the same eaten rotor housing results.

Blaming the seal is easy, finding the true root cause of the problem is time consuming and most DIY builders just want to get their cars running again. This is the reason some have gone through 5-10 engines.

However I am not going to spend endless hours playing "Guess the condition of my parts" or "Guess my mods". I always need to see the complete engine and often the car to determine what happened in any particular case.

We have built ITS race engines running Super Seals that have survived muliple seasons. As any racer will tell you this is a very demanding environment spending nearly all of it's time near 9k rpm. We recently opened one of them up just to see how things were going and there was virtually no housings wear.

 

Yep I'll add that to Steve's growing list. Had what turned out to be a PPF issue (twisted did not break). He's putting in the hi flow cat and then it's off to the dyno.

 

Years do not mean anything when talking about engine life. We have to know how many km or miles an engine has done. A drag racer can race 5 seasons with xyz seal without any problems but in reality he has done less then 100 miles whereas a car that makes 5k to 10k miles per year will cover 25-50k after 5 years. A drag racer will do 3-5 runs per event (10 seconds each time) and let's say the season has 10 events, it'll average 30-40 runs probably with higher octane, oil flush more often etc. A street driven car will do no less than 100 runs in a year incl. burnouts, highway rolls, traffic lights, high speed runs etc. And each of these actions will last way more than 10 seconds.

I am not trying to underestimate drag racing or say it is not hard on the engine but if you are using a similar spec'd car in the street you are actually putting it through a harder test.

I wonder if premixing is there to offset harsh aftermarket seals. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite because I am planning to use premix in my new engine however only for extra insurance not because I think it is a must.

I have read in this forum in the past that oem seals may be softer on the edges, not sure if it's true though.

 

high revving high loads are definitely an infinite amount harsher on the seals and housings than cruising on the freeway giving the engine a moderate push now and then. this is mainly because of the expanding forces at the higher RPMs, the faster the engine is revving the more that tiny bit of weight of the seal is pushing on the housing, creating friction, trying to gall the surface and embed itself, is doing.

this is one more reason why ceramics are so easy on the engine, because they are so light. many high revving engine builds(9k RPMs+) aim for the lightest seal that they can get away with, ceramic or carbon.

that said, i imagine some if not most of the failures from seals eating housings are from improperly setup builds, running engines with harsher seals bouncing the engine off the limiter for extended periods of time. one of my n/a customers showed me pictures of the engine he tore down that had severely gouged housings, this was an engine built with atkins seals and was the only one i built that i have seen an issue with. coincidentally he was running the engine on the track mainly and running the engine to 9k regularly, overheating it didn't help either but he knew the engine was on it's last legs so he cooked it just to finish the day off. i'd have to guess it had around 30k miles, a dozen or more track events, a number of dyno sessions and about 5 years of use.

 

my FC is running better than ever with RA super seals and used housings. 11.42@122mpg with a s5 hybrid turbo. fired up as soon as the gas hit the spark plugs after the rebuild
theres 5000 miles on it now. I definitely plan on using the RA super seals when I rebuild the engine in my FD this winter.
with all my searching i could only find people saying tey heard they eat housings.
I hate how people bad mouth a product from a single incident. that guy with the gouged housing didn't know if the tuner added premix,it could have been a flaw in the housing or assembled wrong.
if gouging was a problem you would think i would have had a problem with my used housings the past 2 summers of drag racing and autox

 

the point is which seals start to gouge easiest, to which there seems to be no easy to find answer without a lot of wasted money/time on R+D testing of various seals.

once the seals begin to dig into the housing it can only get worse from there.

about the only seals i have never seen really gouge the housings are OEM, and likely why mazda chose them after their countless hours actually testing the various seals. they can lightly score the chrome but not anything like some of the pictures i have seen of other seals. they would likely fail before going to such extremes.

 

Read post 26:

 

Chris my comment wasn't directed at you. Those are just my thoughts in general.

Since we are on topic, let's take post 26 and replace every "RA seals" in it with "Mazda OEM seals". Get my drift?