I am new to this forum and have found this to be quite useful. I looked for a while to find one that is this useful thanks for setting this up.

I have a 1999 Eclipse RS with a 420A non turbo engine. The car has 112,000 miles on it. I have a few questions I hope this forum might be able to answer for me.

This is my daily driver and occasional autocross racer. My plan is to keep the engine stock for now.

I am in the middle of a rebuild on the motor. The rebuild was prompted by the common head gasket leak issue with this engine as well as it has started to blow smoke out of the tail pipe on take off.

I ran a compression check and found the compression to be #1 and #2 are at 150, #3 is at 130, and #4 is at 115. all of which are low. I put some oil in the cylinders and reran the compression check in which all the cylinders pressures rose considerably. This I believe shows my rings to be weak.

My questions are: Can I reuse the stock pistons rods and bolts? Are the rod bolts stretch to yield and need to be replaced? Will the rods stand up to another 100,000 miles if I reuse them?

Thanks for you help!

I have seen stock internals hit 200,000 miles, but there is never a guarantee, if you are rebuilding a new set of eagle rods for around $300, pretty cheap insurance. If you plan to do any future boost/nitrous, you would be a looking about about $450-500 for some forged pistons.