[DanEC]

Help, I'm trying to regain my equilibrium. I'm nearly 60 years old and I read a post on another forum where the writer asserted that piston rings rotate on the piston due to torque imparted by the cross-hatch honing on the cylinder walls. He seemed very sincere and confident in this. If by any chance this is so, I'm trying to figure out how I've never known this from messing around with muscle cars and light engine work since I was 18 - but I'm not a master mechanic by any stretch.

I asked him how the ring knew which way to rotate since the cross-hatching from the honing ran both clockwise and counter-clockwise due to the hone cycling up and down - but that didn't throw him off his stance.

I kept waiting for someone else to step in and say, yep - that's right, or nope - that's BS. But no one ventured another opinion.

So, do piston rings rotate as the piston cycles up and down? If so I wouldn't think it would be all that big a deal to assemble a ring package on a piston with the gaps all lined up. A few cycles and they would be spread around anyway.