Same material as every piston company uses...

Wiseco.

Jeff

 

frm is a type of metal, nakisil is a coating. if i could find the link i would show you but damn payin 6 bux to use a forum..... if anyone has paid and gots a sn i can use on preludeonline ill get the link....

 

Interesting. I have actually found a web page that supports that idea here : http://www.aera.org/Members/EngineTe...tts_advice.htm

Anyway, this is Swain's response on the issue of Forged pistons in the FRM environment...
"Jared,

Thanks for writing. I have not heard of the iron coating on pistons as much
as tin coating, but I have heard of it. Tin or Babbitt has been used for
years because iron is a nasty material to spray. We have a coating called
PC-9 that we use for forged pistons in FRM. It is very reasonably priced ($18 each piston), very
tough (we use it on IRL pistons and factory S&S motorcycle pistons) and
great for lubrication and wear resistance. We can spray iron on the piston,
but that is difficult to do unless it is set up for production. What you
need to do is under cut the area that is going to be coated, build it up
with metal (in this case it would be iron) and finish machine the coating to
the size you need. Not an easy or inexpensive task. The cost-effective and most practical choice would be PC-9. The PC-9 only adds
about .0015-.002" to the diameter the piston. If they were my pistons, I
would use the PC-9.

Richard
Swain Tech Coatings"

Strange, he answered my email also. Here is what he said :

Thanks for writing. The skirt coatings will work well against any sleeve.
They have run against everything such as aluminum, steel, nickasil, ceramic
composites and just about anything you can think of. I cannot say for sure
if it will solve your potential problem of wear, but the PC-9 skirt coating
is the one that will give you the best chance.


Richard
Swain Tech Coatings

In my email, I specifically mentioned FRM, but he never mentioned it in his reply to me. Sounds like that coating may actually do the trick, but we need a guinea pig to try it.

Furry : pay the damn $6 already. Whining about $6 is so ghetto . Since I am a paying member, one immediately obvious fact when you do a search is that not a single thread on the forum supports the notion of Nikasil. Not one. If there are any references to it, they are made by ignorant people who keep repeating the same thing over and over again, and never bother actually learn about what they are talking about. It annoys the hell out of me.

Nikasil is expensive, because a company called Mahle (www.mahleinc.com) has a patent on it. There are a lot more cost-effective coatings than Nikasil (such as Swain's coatings). One other fact here is that virtually everyone in the business will admit that most coatings wear or flake off over time. Nikasil is no exception either.

Anyways, it looks like Swain's PC-9 coating may be the ticket after all.

 

sorry but i am not paying 6 bux to use a forum... its rediculus and i cant really afford it. im a freshman in collage trying to build a race car... i need all the money i can get.


i have been looking for that link on the web, no luck yet... tho

 

ok....... i found some more info. evidently i rembered wrong. i take back most of the mess i said b4.

the frm sleeve is only 0.5mm thick. during the casting of the block a fiber-based material in the form of cylinder sleeve is first inserted into the die of the block. Melted liquid aluminium is poured into the die and integrates with the fiber sleeve. Then the cylinder wall is machined to the desire bore dimension, leaving only 0.5 mm thickness to the fiber sleeve which covers the cylinder wall.

so in theory as long as nuthing penetrates the 0.5mm frm then there is nuthing to worry about. the problem comes when you bore it over .25mm. That leaves 0.25mm of FRM to protect the aluminum block. get even the slightest scoring of the cylinder wall and the bare aluminum will be exposed. a error in the casting could also produce a thinner layer of FRM.