gas engines dont have 20- 22.5:1 compression ratio on a brutally cold start up. rings are fragile , that compression ratio i listed is for small naturally aspirated diesels usually , that is what i have seen with finding broken rings. in particular a ford 1000 with 1500 hrs 2 cylinder, 6 compression rings 4 out of 6 rings were in 2 peices or more, old care takers and operators of tractor regulary used ether in it after it was overhualed i ran it 2500 hrs without any problems and if i used ether it was a drop or 2 on a corner of a paper towel wiffed by the air filter inlet , we dont know why or how it breaks them but us mechanics know what we see and usually get the rest of the story after its repaired . unless someone want to go to school to be a diesel engine design engineer and torture tester and figure out the exact physics of it we may never know . have you ever seen an inexperienced person triing to light off a diesel that wont start with a can of starting fluid? A. they soak the air filter with it or B they are smart enough to take the air filter out and spray it down the throat but dont have someone to crank it while doing so , so a **** ton gets sprayyed into the intake and then they go try and start it . remember we are not talking gas engines running nitrous we are talking very cold weather diesels starting dead cold , alot of diesels arent using some kind of an exotic piston ring either like those gas engines you described above . actually physical means was already explained ether detonates on pistons travel upwards triing to push piston wrong way then when that force is over come here comes a fuel injection cycle then it repeats untill the ether is gone, now do this all the time something is bound to give up the ghost and get fatiqued, thats my theory on how and why they get broke into peices . only a guess but just a logical one . one would have to know the actuall cylinder pressures and tensile strength of rings and how much pressure actually got to them and have to make a test engine to figure out how and what it takes to break a particullaer engines rings , im not planning on going to school for this i just keep the ether locked up so some jo blow cant spray a whole can of it into an engine before they call me out for a no start .
It had nothing to do with ether, but I was working around a Gardner-Denver W series compressor that spit the middle 2 cylinders into the air once. That was exciting.
Mostly just tired. It was the second stage cylinder bank, a piston came apart and stacked up to hit the head hard. Broke the flange that held the cylinders to the crankcase and sheared the inlet and outlet flange bolts, tore off the water lines, threw the cylinders and head about 20 feet and left the 2 pistons and rods flailing about.
