This would apply to casidium coatings on wrist pins/bearing, thermal coatings on piston skirts/domes/chambers/valve faces, even oil shedding coatings on crank counterweights, blah blah blah.

I've been planning out the next turbo motor over the last few months and have been following the Engine Master's Challenge pretty closely. All 3 of the top builders used thermal coating on the combustion chambers and some had casidium-coated wrist pins & bearings. Any additional input of these coatings (pros/cons, personal experiences) would be appreciated. I won't spare any expense on this motor and the casidium coatings on the bearings and wrist pins really caught my attention.

 

Except for combustion chamber chamber and piston crown coatings I think coatings are pretty far out on the price/performance curve. I use thermal barrier coated piston crowns and am thinking about coating at least the exhaust valves at some point. But it's primarily for protection of the parts from high combustion chamber temps on my blown + nitrous combo. Probably nets a few hp though. Unless everything else was really optimized other engine coatings just don't seem worth it to me. Maybe a thermal barrier on the bottom of the intake manifold would be the next most beneficial.

Rich Krause

 

As Rich said the $$$ per HP advantage to most of these coatings is out there.

Even in something like a Engine Masters motor, going with casidium on the pins is a bit extreme. Casidium's orginal use was on Ti piston pins to help prevent galling. It does reduce friction in the motor and can also be used on valve stems and if you really want to get trick on connecting rods and crank throws if you have a rod weight rule since you can toss the bearings and save about 45g of bobweight. It's not a bearing coating though.

Now coated bearings are a great idea in any motor. They will save you money if something happens to the motor and they have slightly less friction. I am definately a fan of them.

After that coated piston tops, and skirts is a very good idea both for increased thermal efficentcy (since a motor is a very inefficent in the thermal department) Coated piston tops can help save pistons in motors where detonation is very likely or from very high cylinder temps. A LA a blown motor.

Coated chambers and valve faces are just like the coated pistons they help keep heat in the chamber which means more of the potential energy converted from the air/fuel to heat pushes down on the piston rather than escapes into the cylinder head.

Oil shedding coatings are pretty useful for windage control. Don't know how much of a place they have on a motor unless it's a no holds barred motor.

Next would be any thermal coating to keep the intake and cylinder heads cool, that's going to help make power and let you run more and more compression (both static and dynamic).

Bret

 

Actually Bret reminded me about coated bearings as a protective method, not a hp producer. That's not a bad idea on a motor that is really going to get the snot beat out of it.

Rich

 

Thanks for the replies. I looked over Calico's site last night and they had some pretty nice stuff. The coated bearings would only be a preventive maintanence thing, not for HP. If I need more power, I'll run a bigger turbo. The coating in the combustion chamber is pretty much a given for what I was looking at.

I got a little confused on the casidium stuff too. That's only for connections that see a lot of stress like crank journals, cam lobes and wrist pins, correct?

 

Yes but I would say that it's more applicaple in situations where you want to prevent galling as in Ti pins and valves.

Bret