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The pistons in your typical four cylinder engine will collectively rise and fall one million times in a thousand miles. In order to burn a quart of oil every thousand miles, you are only using a millionth of a quart per cylinder every rotation of the engine.
I find it to be a darn near miracle that most engines don't use oil at anywhere near that rate, can revolve 100 times a second, and last well over 100,000 miles. When I was a kid with no money, we never replaced pistons or re bored an engine, and I never lost one to a broken ring.
Cleanliness, OTOH, is next to Godliness when it comes to engine internals. But I bolted together an old Volvo engine with a friend in an open shed during a wind storm, and the wind was whipping up the sand. You could see the scratch marks in the walls of the cylinders when we turned the crank, but it turned freely. We bolted it together anyway, much to my annoyance...
That sucker ran until the body rusted out from under it.
I could never have gotten away with that, but God loves fools and Good Old Boys.
My great uncle was a mechanic way back in the early days. He had a lot of interesting stories about what they bolted together and ran.
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