Cryogenic Super Finish?

[Jayneflakes]

Have a look at this here link and then discuss?


I am intrigued as to what reducing the temperature of your engine during building can do do. Obviously I know a little tiny bit about heat treating, so am interested in the idea of cooling to gain strength etc.

I heard of this first in a HIFI mag where they claimed that speaker cable that is cooled for half an hour performs better through out its life. Mind you that was speaker cable that costs about £90 per metre!

What do you lot think?

[johnnyrod]

Lookslike snake oil frankly. Heat treatment can alter the grain structure of metals so changes their toughness and hardness, but I don't see how just cooling something will make any difference once it's warmed up again.

re. the hifi cable, I wouldn't read too much into that. if the cable stayed cold then its resistance would be lower, but that's temporary. Hifi people can think up all sorts of things, remember putting CDs in the freezer?

Shrink fitting is a well-known process, components are made very cold so they are smaller, so you can get a really tight fit once they warm back up. I don't think that's what they're on about, or that they reassemble your engine at -200C

Normal practice,example, fitting a ring gear on a flywheel,cool flywheel heat up ring gear drop on,sorted. Obviously there are many other applications where this can be applied in mechanical engineering and is on a daily basis.

[yorkie_chris]

Superfinish is totally different to a shrink fit or something like that.

The parts on their own are bathed in a supercooled compound. Beyond that I don't have much idea what it does, I think it's some sort of fancy polishing that's meant to reduce friction.

Once you've got your "superfinished" engine parts, the engine is assembled as normal.

Never clicked the link just read the thread-----------sorry

Love the Q&A bit on that site, about 20 different ways of answering the question 'Isn't this a load of horse****?'

[mikerj]

Originally Posted by Jayneflakes

Have a look at this here link and then discuss?


I am intrigued as to what reducing the temperature of your engine during building can do do.

It can make you poorer and someone else richer.

[yorkie_chris]

Well I saw one bike mag article saying it made a huge difference, made the engine sound completely different, rev much faster etc.
But going on bike journo integrity I'm sure that ported head, race cams, big bore kit and lightened crank they fitted at the same time and neglected to mention had absolutely no effect on it...


Personally I'm not discounting it, but I wouldn't recommend it either until I see more detail than that. I'm not convinced cooling will change the grain structure of steel in any permanent way.

[Paul the 6th]

there was an article about this in performance bikes last year - think they had the engine of a 10 year old r6 (or something along those lines) superfinished and then re-assembled. The way they explained it was that it was a similar idea to blue printing an engine, in that parts on a production line are produced to tolerances - by superfinishing the surfaces of moving parts in an engine, friction was reduced to an aboslute minimum (like on a microscopic level) to allow the engine to run as efficiently as possible.

Not 100% on the figures but there was like 15-20bhp more power and the engine/power delivery felt different/more refined after the process had been performed, but they concluded that it was an expensive job for anyone average trackday enthusiasts.. However it might be useful for race teams who've already blue printed and tuned their bikes within the rules of a given race series.

bimble bimble
off to see which department does this at work