zguy36

From my understanding of what ceramic coatings are for, is to reduce the heat brought into the piston. This in turn can reduce detonation, due to a colder piston head. But when detonation does occur, the extreme pressures and forces are not reduced by having a coated piston. The coatings may reduce the intensity of the detonation. I think for the most part, I am very lucky that I haven't destroyed each and every piston in this engine.

There could be two sides to the coin here. 1: Even though they look the same, the materials could be of a much lesser quality. So despite the fact the have the same appearance, they could break/wear out/fall apart in much less time. 2: The company that builds these could also be a supplier for Tial or HKS and are selling some of these on their own. Chinese manufacturers don't have much of a code of ethics.

So, I posted a bit earlier in this post slinging some hate in the direction of ceramic coatings. I would like to retract all previous statements and shed some much better light on the situation. Here is the history of my motor. The first 30K miles put on this engine were running the sketchy stock fuel injection and about 17psi of boost. As you all know, this can't be done on the stock setup without a few bandaids. I ran water injection, and a seven injector actuated by hand to dump more fuel. This setup would experience detonation on a regular basis. This setup had all stock internals, except for a steel o-rings with a copper head gasket, and ceramic coated stock pistons. The detonation on this setup was so regular that I had broken ten or so spark plugs, and also blew the copper head gasket. The next 10k miles were run much more sanely. I put on a megasquirt, brought the AFRs down from 17:1 under boost to 12.5:1 under boost. Still running same boost. When the copper head gasket blew, I replaced it with a steel one, but also noted extremely bad flaking on the piston tops. I thought this was the ceramic coating coming off. I scraped the bad places off and put it all back together. So, now that the engine is down for a rebuild (worn thrust bearings with .25" axial crank play), I decided to do rings along with bearings. When cleaning the piston tops off, I found that the ceramic coating was still there! It had survived the massive amounts of detonation. The only reason I didn't find it there is that the color had changed from the light gray to aluminum color. When wire brushing the piston tops off, you could see low spots with machining marks under them. The cermic was a pain to remove, but it held up. So, as far as saying that ceramic coatings can't handle abuse, that is just plain wrong. As far as the benifits from using them, that is much more difficult to determine. As far as my setup is concerned, I will re-coat my pistons again when I put it back together. You can't beat a good diy coating price wise! The coatings were CBX from http://www.techlinecoatings.com

I have an old downpipe (3" mandrel) that fits the stock nissan turbo. If you want to buy it, you could take it and cut it up to fit your application. Let me know.

yeah, I'm gonna pay a hundred bucks for a shirt!

To add to the list of unhappy cermaic coating users, I have had two engines that came apart looking just like 240hoke's, but without the FOD. One engine (l28et) had been run for 30,000 miles with roughly 75% of the coating flaked away. This engine had seen enough detonation to blow a copper head gasket with steel o-rings in the block, but there was no major damage to the stock pistons. In my opinion, if the coating can't even take the abuse that a stock piston can take, then it isn't doing much for you. The other engine was a mazda rotary that had 300 miles on it with a blown apex seal. Rotary's are very sensitive to detonation, and that is what caused the destruction of that engine, with only one instance of detonation due to fuel pump failure. In this case, large quantities of the cermaic coating had flaked away too, with only a handful of audible knocks. I can vouch for the application process of the coatings in both of these engines, since I am the one who coated them. www.techlinecoatings.com sells coatings to shops, but also for home use. Both engines were coated with the turbo specific application coating, with all instructions followed to the T. I don't know what you want to consider as anecdotal, but there seems to be a building case against these coatings. If the tests of seeing the coatings through from start to death is not scientific enough for you, I'm not sure what would be. The results that I have gathered, these coatings are worthless for the average user. The gain you get (lower oil temps, higher hp, lower coolant temps) are not enough to warrant the cost for a street application. The durability of these coatings is not enough to handle detonation of any sort.

Leave the screwdriver and hammer alone and find yourself a big rock! A grinder would be your best bet, your air hammer is just going to beat the crap out of everything.

if you don't want it taking up space in your garage, I'll give you fifty bucks for it.

cut slowly, if you force the saw then the blade will walk all over

A switch to a t5 world class would be nice. They shift so much better than the basic t5. I had one laying around, but it didn't seem to be any easy drop in, so for the lack of time I gave up on it.

The tach is an inductive pickup type. Run one of the coil wires to this, then back to the coil and your tach will work.

You can't transfer enough power through a single V belt to run your supercharger.

Yes, tuned tubing lengths also work for turbo headers. Just because the air is under pressure doesn't make it any different.

it's impossible to give you an answer without more information. Check your timing, check your air/fuel ratio. You'll most likely see a huge problem with one. When you find that, you can go from there.

In regards to grinding down the face of the calipers, there is quite a lot of material that you can remove before you reach fluid. I ground down the middle rib on the toyota calipers almost flush with rest of the caliper. I did grid too far once (removed material below flush) and ran into the balance passage that allows fluid to flow between cylinders. Nothing a quick weld up couldn't fix though. I'm still running that caliper with no problems or leaks (two years and running)

I just pulled 375hp at 5300rpm before the clutch let loose... I'll post more complete numbers when the snow melts and a new clutch is put in.

exhaust is .63, not sure about the cold side

I just had a thought, and maybe this is where some confusion in coming into play. There are forces exerted on the strut assembly from the caliper, but these forces are a moment. This moment however, acts on the centerline of the spindle. It is the caliper mounting brackets and the knuckle that bring this moment to the centerline. So the resultant force on the strut is trying to twist the whole assembly in the same direction that the wheel is spinning.

As I said before, caliper placement can have no effect on the compression or extension of suspension. The first thing they teach engineers is to draw a free body diagram, label all of your parts and all of your vector forces. If you do this, then you will see that all forces are counteracted inside of the braking system (caliper, hub, knuckle) As for caliper placement on the rear swingarm of a motorcycle, this is a different story. There will be an effect of placement, but in a much simpler manner. The caliper has weight, so the closer you put this weight to the pivot of the swingarm, the less equivalent unsprung weight you have.

All forces that interact between the caliper and rotor are all internal to the knuckle that holds the wheel bearing and the caliper mount. No matter where you mount your caliper, it will NOT compress your suspension.

Rotary engines are LIGHT! I don't have an exact number, but I can tell you that a friend and I lifted a long block into the back of his geo without even having to try. Weight savings doesn't do you a lot of good though, when you lose the reliability of your engine!

I only used a tig on my manifold, since I did not have stainless wire for the mig. The tig did end up warping the heck out of the manifold though. I started in the middle and by the time I got to the ends, the flanges had lifted amost an inch! This took some serious time with a torch heading and pounding to get the flanges back to being even close to where they were supposed to be. All of this heating did stress relieve all of the weld joints though, so I haven't had any warping issues after instal.

Hey man, you found my own pictures quicker than I did. I was planning on adding them to my post, but you beat me to the punch. I built this one using stainless weld els, 1/2" flanges and tig'd it together. I've since ceramic coated it black. I haven't had much of a chance to test out the twin scroll, or have much for a comparison with snowy roads. I did get a chance to stick it on the dyno and put out 375 before the clutch let loose. With the twin scroll actuator being fully opened before the wastegate starts to open, I start building boost at 2200rpm to 4psi at 2600rpm... then it holds there till about 3600rpm then builds to 20psi at 4000rpm. I am running at gt4082 If anyone else has this turbo, chime in and say what rpm you get your boost by. When I get a new clutch put in that will hold the power, I'll post some more results (#$% spec clutches)

take a look at the header in my user gallery, this was made with the sch40 weld els

you can remove the broken studs easily with a torch. Concentrate all of the heat onto the bolt, then when it gets hot enough to cut, blast it with the O2 and blow the bolt out of the hole. If you are good with a torch, you can do this without even hurting the threads. Run a tap through it to clean it up and you are as good as new.