Re: oil loss
What kind of rings are you using, and what kind of hone did you get when it was rebuilt? Also, what type of oil are you using, and has the ECU been tuned for that engine?
It's possible that the valve seals were damaged when the valves were changed, but a quart of oil through the valve seals is a huge amount over that small of a mileage (especially without seeing a lot of smoke). It would be rare for all the seals to be damaged badly enough for that, and you'd normally have smoke on startup because oil will pool in the cylinders while the engine sits. So I'm not really sure if the symptoms point to that problem.
Regardless, the oil has to be going somewhere, and because this is a fresh build I would always suspect a break-in problem with the rings and hone. Driving the the 200 mile trip with no oil loss isn't necessarily an indicator of anything, mostly because oil consumption can change depending on whether the engine is warmed up or not. If you drove two hours each way with a hot engine, the oil loss might be totally different than a bunch of around town driving starting from a cold engine. It's also possible that you've done enough break-in that now you're starting to have oil control problems with the rings for whatever reason.
Engine break-in is some kind of voodoo as far as I'm concerned, but conventional wisdom often says that it's bad to run at fairly constant RPM during break-in. Maybe that couple hour trip didn't do good things for your oil control. I'm just throwing around possibilities...
Just to further complicate the issue, a compression test won't necessarily tell you much about oil loss problems. You can have perfect compression and bad oil control because the things that do a lot of the oil control don't have anything to do with cylinder sealing.
Last edited by Fabrik8; Jul 1, 2010 at 02:06 PM.