Hoping for a bit of advice from someone who's used to disassembling & reassembling the small Honda clone engines.

I've stripped the head down on my Kazuma Meerkat 48cc engine to decoke / check everything / replace head gasket / regrind valves.

Head is now all nice and clean with reground valves all back together.

The cylinder barrel is still located on the cylinder head studs with the piston inside.

I have all the necessary new gaskets at hand & ready to reassemble - however there is one old gasket still on the engine, the one between the barrel and the block.

I cannot remove & replace this one without removing the barrel, thus also withdrawing the piston from the barrel.

I'm worried that if I pull the piston out of the barrel, The rings will spring out, and I might then have trouble reinserting the piston and rings into the barrel (I don't have any kind of piston ring compressor in my toolkit).

Having worked on a lot of other small engines though, I've found I've not always needed a compressor.

Is there a good likelihood on these engines that the piston & rings will go back in easy enough without a special compressor, or should I play safe & just reassemble, leaving the old barrel-to-block gasket in place?

 

Take the cylinder off. There is a chamfer at the cylinder base which helps with re-fitting rings. Most ring compressors wouldn't work anyway as you would be stuck with it between crankcase and cylinder afterwards. Also always check the ring gap with the top ring in the cylinder when you take the head off, modern rings are strange stuff, they don't break easily, but wear faster than old cast rings did, and faster than the bore, so worth checking and fitting new rings if the gap is over specification. Ensure you know which way up the ring is, so you can put it back on the piston if OK. Honda 90 top ring gap is 0.012" max, a 50cc bike will be a bit less.

 

10 thou feeler gauge fits ok. Rings back in no prob.

Before grinding valves, carburettor adjustment all over the place & couldn't get away from bogging

After grinding valves & reassembling, everything is peachy :-)

I don't know if it was the valves leaking, or the cylinder head gasket.. but the old head gasket looked pretty undamaged.

Only other thing might have been, there was no exhaust gasket fitted when I first dismantled everything. I found one in the gasket kit I ordered so that went in along with everything else.