Wilsons Sandbox

I was in Montana when I suddenly started experiencing very high oil consumption, about a quart per hundred miles. I changed oil in a Walmart parking lot and filtered the old oil through cheesecloth but saw nothing unusual in the drained oil. I bought a second gallon of Rotela-T and made it back home (800 miles) by adding oil whenever the shifting was hard, so I was stopping three times per tank of fuel, adding a pint or more at each stop. Upon disassembly the broken bit of piston was trapped between the rings where it did nothing harmful to the bore. Kawasaki initially was unwilling to warrantee "oil consumption" but I successfully argued that SOMETHING had broken inside the engine to cause the sudden onset of the oil consumption and that something was covered by the Good Times Protection Plan the DPO was thoughtful enough to buy for me. K agreed initially to just one hour labor for teardown but picked up all the labor when the cracked piston was found. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]