Posted by Matt Wilson on Friday, January 19, 2001 at 9:51PM :
In Reply to: Nitriding my crankshaft posted by Matt Wilson on Thursday, January 18, 2001 at 10:46PM :
Wow! Thanks for all the responses! I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, so I am aware that metallurgy makes all the difference in the world, in making a heat-treating decision. But my knowledge of some of this stuff is surpassed by the knowledge some of you guys possess! I had my suspicions that doing some kind of heat-treat might be risky, considering all the unknowns regarding the metallurgy of a 230 crank. I was in hopes that there was some standard treatment common to many cranks.
The gentleman I spoke with seems to have had good results with this. He has souped up his engine and has spent most of his driving time on the highway, driving at speeds of 57 - 58 mph with 5.83 gears, and has done so for a few years. He now has 20,000 miles on the rebuild. He also had the engine balanced, which I will also do, and he uses a viscous fluid vibration damper. Anyway, it sounds like he has a rock-solid engine. It would be interesting to see if his engine will last a really long time under these conditions.
Cryogenic treatment never crossed my mind. I looked up the web site mentioned by gtk. There's a lot of great info there! It sounds like there is great potential with this kind of process, and not too expensive.
In the end, I will probably not have any heat treatments or cryo treatments performed on mine, but it's interesting to know that this stuff exists. I plan to do some performance mods, including upgraded camshaft, dual-carb intake, headers, high-compression head, electronic ignition. I will have my engine balanced, maybe install a viscous harmonic balancer (vibration damper) and generally take good care of the truck. I have 4.89's already, and I will not drive like a maniac, but I wanted to know what the possiblities were, for making my own rock-solid engine.
Thanks again for all the responses, and keep 'em coming if you have more.
Matt
|
This board is powered by the Mr. Fong Device from Cyberarmy.com |