While I had the plugs out I got in there with a bore scope, and I was surprised how rough the cylinder walls looked. There is some scoring, and some pitting that looks like it may have been a casting flaw in the cylinder jug, but most puzzling to me is that all four cylinders have a very dense and pretty regular scuff pattern that looks as if they'd been machine sanded after being bored, and then never polished.
Is this normal for an 83 1100E? It's hard to tell with the bore scope exactly how deep the marks are, but it's very distinctly different from my partner's 1980 2-cylinder small bore honda I was looking at a few weeks ago. There's two distinct biases to the scour lines, spiraling down the bore both clockwise and counter-clockwise.
What am I looking at? Is it a sign that someone did a hackjob trying to refinish or re-bore the cylinders? The sanding patterm is visible in all of the attached photo and was consistent across all cylinders.
Besides this sanding pattern, there are a few other signs of damage in here. There's some longitundinal scoring, which I assume is due to debris or a problem with the piston rings.
There's also some very similar-looking radial scoring going *around* the bore in both cylinder 1 and 4. It looks like a score mark similar to the longitudinal ones, but I have no idea how this would happen. Is there anything in particular this could indicate that I should be concerned about?
Finally, in cylinder 4 there are two different spots in the cylinder wall (roughly opposite each other across the cylinder, near the bottom of the stroke) with a dense cluster of what looks like pitting. My best guess about this is that it's a casting flaw that's been there since the cylinder was machined.
It looks like the cylinders are in pretty rough shape to me, but the engine runs. It's a little rough, and the piston seals clearly aren't great because there's gas in the oil and the exhaust is a bit smoky - now I know why.
I still plan to check the ignition timing, do valve clearances, and tune and sync the carbs - I'm hopeful that if any of these items are currently out of spec, fixing them might be enough to get the engine running reasonably smoothly, even if it is burning a bit of oil.
I would really appreciate any input on the condition of this engine.
Would y'all be looking at doing a top-end rebuild to get the cylinders in better shape? Is there anything else I should be looking out for that's indicated here that I'm not aware of?
Thanks for any input!
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