cryo treated engine
 

has anyone had there engine cryo treated, i know a place that will do the whole engine for $500, im going with a s.c so i think it will be a good upgrade since no internal engine parts are out that i know of

That sounds like one heck of a deal!

Entire engine meaning block, head, and internals(rods, pistons, crank)? or just block... it probably depends on how much boost you want to hold.

I'd talk to the supercharger company you are going to buy from, they will know more. Cryo treatment should make things stronger (many performance gears are cryo treated) but I'd check with people who can vouch for that specific application first. You don't want it to weaken anything, and it might sacrifice one type of strength for another. I don't know. Sounds like a good deal though, unless the 500 could go toward replacing the weak link in the engine with a part made for boost.

its the whole engine, and its only makes the metal stronger, sometimes as high as 30% stronger

cryo treating does not work on aluminum.

What does this process do? Is it some sort of flash freezing process that alters the structure of the metal? If that's the case, this would make the metal harder, but also increase brittleness and reduce ductility...

Probably $500 if you bring them all the parts in pristine clean condition. Which still requires you to pull the motor, dissasemble it and reassemble later.

Cryo-treating has some good points, but really, get custom made forged pistons and shot peen the rods and you'll be fine with up to 10PSI boost.

Cryo-treating is the process of immersing metal parts in liquid nitrogen, which brings the parts down to a temperature of minus 300 degrees F. The benefit, in some metals like carbon steel, is that this process realigns the crystalline structure of the metal, and makes it stronger and more dense. However, brittleness is not a side effect. The knife-making company Cold Steel uses this process on all of their edged products- knives, axes, tomahawks. The tools/weapons hold a razor-sharp edge far longer than competitive products, but the knives remain far more flexible and resistant to breaking than they are before the cryo-treatment. Many brass instrument makers who make trumpets, cornets, etc., also use this process to improve the tone of the instruments.

Injundon is correct about the need to cryo-treat individual , disassembled engine parts. You cannot just stick a fully assembled engine into a bath of liquid nitrogen and expect to get any benefit, and no one in that industry would even try to do it.

I see, I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of quenching. But any rapid reduction in temperature usually causes brittleness as the material changes its crystalline structure. Can't remember which metals benefit from these quenching methods, I kinda dropped all my materials crap after the course was done hahaha...

Quenching is when you rapidly reduce the temperature of metal that you have previously raised to an extremely high temperature. If water is used for the quenching, the steel does become very brittle. But if various baths of oil, some of which are at elevated temperatures, are used to slowly cool the hot steel, this is called "annealing", and the result is the desired hardening of the steel without the undesired brittleness.

I have a video tape from the Cold Steel sales dept. showing the entire cryo-treatment process that they use. As an example, they took a brand-new K-Bar military knife and with a hammer, pounded it into a telephone pole about knee high. Then a 200 lb. guy stood on the knife handle and bounced on it once or twice until the knife blade broke off at the handle. Then they pounded one of their own military knives into the wood, and the same guy kept bouncing on the handle until it was obvious that their knife would never break like the KBar. Then they wiggled their knife loose from the phone pole, pounded the edge through a 1/2" dia. steel bolt until the bolt was cut in half, and then used the knife edge to cut a sheet of paper. All to demonstrate the strength of cryo-treated steel.

You can cryo treat aluminum. You can cryo treat a lot of metals, but not zinc. One of the most commonly cryo treated metals is aluminum.

LOL thanks for the refresher man, I didn't think I'd need it after my materials class hahaha...I'll leave it to the well servicing companies :p

manxman sounds a metallurgist. way cool.

Mechanical Engineer and Certified Metallographer (retired).

I will be selling cryo trested piston and rods that are also coated as soon once mine are finished