03-10-2018, 03:05 PM
A most unlikely theory on the subject, but you never know stranger things have happened, having read this post it occured to me, that with a cast iron manifold and aluminium pistons you have the recipe for thermite. If a bit of rust from the manifold came into contact with a bit of aluminium oxide on the piston top, this would need a temperature of some 1650 C to ignite it, that is only a fraction of the 2500 C in a combustion chamber and it would produce a reaction of 4000 c that would easily melt a hole in a piston.