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You will also have to hone the cylinders to help the rings seal. New rings installed in a used bore won’t seal well creating crappy compression and leakdown numbers, resulting in poor performance. Honing will provide a fresh bore surface so new rings will seat. If the engine has overheated or lost oil pressure and the cylinder bores are worn (especially on high mileage engines), out of round, or damaged, you might need to align hone the main bearing and cam bearing bores as well.
The stock EVO rods are pretty strong and can hold up to 500 hp for short periods of time, You might want to keep running them if you are short on money. It is safer to run a racing forged billet rod though. Most forged connecting rods from reputable companies like Crower, Eagle and Carrillo come in sets that are already weight matched, shotpeened, heat-treated and ready to drop right in place. Just make sure you install them correctly. If you crank hasn't been damaged, then you won't have to do any additional machining to use them. If you detonated the engine hard enough to lift the head, you should take the time to inspect the main and rod bearings, inspect and measure the crank journals and confirm the oil clearances.
Upgrade your head studs to the ARP head studs which are manufactured from 8740 chrome moly steel and heat-treated to 190,000psi tensile strength. These will provide a higher clamp load and will hold up to higher cylinder pressures so you won’t have to worry about lifting the head again. Using a high quality MLS gasket is a must as well. MLS stands for multilayer steel. We recommend a high quality gasket with a built in stopper layer around the cylinder bores like Cosworth. Avoid simple embossed MLS gaskets on boosted engine. MLS gaskets require a very smooth and flat head and block deck surface and we recommend these surfaces be lapped to less than 0.0003″ flatness.
Now you can “boost a move”, er… my bad.
Got a Tech Question? Email Sarah at asksarah@motoiq.com
