Piston Coatings Advice

I know what the feeelings of most are about coating rod and main bearings in a blown alcohol motor, but what does everyone think about coating the tops and skirts of new pistons before installing? THANKS for any help up front! The engine is a KB top fuel style hemi with 46#s of boost with 11.5 to 1 compression-THANKS!

 

The alcohol will wash down the standard skirt coatings pretty fast. The coatings on the tops is a great investment. But don't think that because they are coated, that you can't still hurt them.

 

Big waste of time and money, as cheap as pistons are there's no need to coat them for blown alcohol.

Brandon Booher
NHRA TAD #34

 

Usually I agree with ya bro, but gotta disagree here (at least give my experience). We have ROSS aplly their "coating" which looks like hard coat anodizing to me? But it literally DOUBLED the piston life and it was only around $15/piston! Next!

 

I'm not sure if it's anodizing or not but the stuff Ross and CP uses is amazing getting more piston life. It also has resulted in less or no ring groove wear for us.

Bob

 

Hard annodize solved so many problems in the piston to ring area. We can run so tight clearances there now. We couldn't even dream of that before the hard annodize. And it works so much better than trying to DLC the ring grooves.
Truly heaven sent!

 

Which clearances, end gaps? Can you explain this more?

 

No, not end gaps. But when dealing with pistons more along the lines of pro stock and NASCAR stuff, we like to see the clearance from the rings to the ring land as tight as we can get them without them micro-welding to eachother. Some teams are getting them REALLY tight.

 

Coating is used in nitrous and endurance applications, as well as nitro. In a blown alky deal it just isn't necessary. If you have skirt issues and ring issues, correcting the problem the right way is the answer; not putting a band-aid on it. I spoke with Ed at CP about this today and he echoed these same things.

Brandon Booher
NHRA TAD #34

 

So your saying "Get rid of the detonation and the coating isn't req'd" PM me Brandon and I will share some of my "experiences" with ya" As opposed to opening a can of worms on here, I'll leave it at that!

 

Piston Coatings

Thanks for all of the advice from ITA, I have contacted many of my blown alcohol friends now and they are getting twice the normal piston life after coating the pistons, some of us are as not as good at tuning as we want to be yet! THANKS! Jim

 

What kind of failure is it helping with, sunken tops, torched down the side, pin boss cracks, etc?

 

Piston Failers

The Piston Top Coatings help keep fom Torching the top down the sides and also helping to keep from sinking the tops, if the tune-up gets off a little! THANKS!