Quote:
Originally Posted by Fishey
Just to add some information to this thread.
J&E 3.4L Pistons have gone through 3 revisions and the new design is not bad but pretty much anything pre-2009 is going to fail. The originals will fail in short order and usually at high RPM meaning catastrophic engine damage. If I had these in my car I would spend the money now to tear it apart and remove them. If you do not know what you have in your car then tear it apart and replace the pistons. The fail rate of the early pistons is 100% I have seen atleast 10 failures. All of them have caused serious block damage as a result. I know they attempted to fix the problem on the piston by moving the oil galley machining on the original forging away from the thin spot at the wrist pin. It did not work so even the 2nd generation pistons fail that being said they might be alright for normal street use. The 3rd generation of this piston is an entirely different forging and they are strong as hell completely redesigned and if they fail it is the result of a poor build/tuning.
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I'm sorry, but this is just not true. You're statement that all of them are going to fail is just ludicrous. I can't even begin to imagine how many thousands of JE pistons we've sold and I can only recall one failure of the wrist pin boss reported back to us when fitted to our cylinders. It was on a 105mm bore, 12.5:1, with a piston over 600 grams in a full race engine and had 235 hours on it when it failed. They should have been houred out long before that.
I have fielded plenty of phone calls with piston failures from other brands including Mahle Motorsports, Wossner (I think at least 3 with failures in our cylinders), and others, so this problem isn't something isolated to one brand and certainly it's not epidemic. One reason you see less of the Mahle ones fail is that those tend to be houred out earlier. I know of several builders who hour them out at 100 hours. Technically most pistons should be houred out no later than that in race use, but no one does. They wait until their engines go boom instead.