Hastings has been at it long before I began wrenching on things, and I've been doing it since the mid-1950's. That's a pretty good chart, but even if the gap is slightly larger, you'll get at least a fair amount of service from a lightly-stressed engine. Since the rings in a 4-stroke engine rotate around the piston during normal running, the only real concern about ring gap is if the gaps on the 1st. and 2nd. rings align momentarily. They won't stay that way long, however. On one of our training engines back when I was teaching high school auto mechanics (with a tempered glass cylinder), we could watch the rings spin around the piston with a delay-flash timing light. Interesting!
Jerry
