GOING FASTER IN AMERICA: It's time to look at friction

Think about it, when it comes to going faster, we ask our motor to work harder. Higher compression means more load on the piston/rings rod and crank. More rev's, means more heat and wear. More cam means more spring. More spring means more friction and more friction SLOWS YOU DOWN. What if we made more power by making things work easier? When things work easier, wouldn't things run cooler and last longer at the same time?

FIGHTING FRICTION: Where Does It Come From?

Racing is (usually) a lubricated world. Take the gears in your transmission. The gear surfaces don't contact each other directly, metal to metal, there's an oil film between them. The rollers in tapered wheel bearings don't actually ride on the steel races, there's a lubricant between them as well. So back to the transmission, if the gear surfaces don't actually touch, where does the heat come from? It is created when gears come together and pushes the oil out from between the gear surfaces. As the oil is pushed out, the peaks and valleys of the gear surfaces upsets the flow, resulting in turbulence in the flow of the oil. This turbulence causes the oil work against itself, creating friction and heat. Therefore reducing the amount of turbulence and improving the flow of the oil will always reduce the amount of friction and heat build-up.

MICROBLUE?: The Only Coating That Reduces Friction When "Things Don't Touch"

MicroBlue actually changes the way lubricants work. You know how slippery you feel in the shower with soft water? Soft water changes the way soap wets your skin, making you feel slippery. When a lubricant comes into contact with any MicroBlue coated surface, it does exactly the same thing-by changing the way a lubricant works on the surface.

This is very different from other coatings you're familiar with. Conventional coatings don't actually do anything until things touch. For example, a DLC coated wrist pin doesn't protect that pin until there's contact with the rod. The same applies to moly coated piston skirts and bearing inserts. They have no effect until things touch. But most importantly, none of them works like soft water works!

If you think about it, in our world (with a few exceptions) things don't touch. Those balls don't actually ride on the steel race surfaces, there's an oil film between them. The same goes for gears and everything else that moves.

FIGHTING FRICTION: Why Smoother Is Better

Smoother is better, but how do we do that in a fast and economical way without changing the size or shape of the part? We have a number of isotropic finishing systems that effectively removes the peaks of the machined surface and does so without disturbing the dimensional tolerances. We're not going to go into how it works here, you can read more HERE The point is, we now have an optically flat surface that not only works well, but looks cool. There are three important benefits here: 1) since the peaks are gone, there is less turbulence and temps go down. 2) the thickness of the protective oil film layer has now been increased. 3) because the peaks are gone, hard metal-to-metal contact is virtually eliminated.

MICROBLUE AND SUPERFINISHING: It Only Makes Sense

Early in the development of MicroBlue? we realized that when applied it to very flat surfaces, the results are truly stunning (see chart on right). Understanding this, there is no logic not to superfinish every moving, loaded and lubricated surface we can. In a transmission, that means everything, gears, shafts, shift forks, dog rings bearings and so forth.

MICROBLUE COATING: The Last Step

Now that we have some very nice looking jewelry, it's time to finish up our "Smooth and Slippery" program. That simply consists of MicroBlue coating all of the polished contact surfaces. Now remember, MicroBlue? results in NO SIZE CHANGE at all, so you need not worry about tolerance changes. Therefore, we are the last step before assembly. For example, you're building a car for the SEMA show. When you're done with it, we simply detail it and get it ready for the show.