The referance below is outdated. Further development has been made in resent years. I brought the cylinders to the KR flyin a few years ago and showed them. The cylinders are CNC machineed from a a solid block of aluminum. The nickle is molten liquid fused to the aluminum and then diamond honed to the cylinder diameter. The nickle is not a coating. Many racing engines have been built and raced in the past 10 years or so. The cylinders can be re-honed if dammaged. My resource that I delt with is LN Engineering. The web site is www.lnengineering.com . They will even build you an engine. They are not cheep. The have cylinders for Vairs and other engines.
Ronald R. Eason Sr. Pres. & CEO, KCMO Office J.R.L. Engineering Consortium Ltd. 816-468-4091, Kansas City, MO. Web Page: www.jrl-engineering.com ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: "Mark Langford" <n5...@hiwaay.net> Reply-To: KRnet <kr...@mylist.net> List-Post: krnet@list.krnet.org Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:40:34 -0600 Kevin wrote: > I think the advantage of Nikasil cylinders is they are cheap. Not for Corvairs/VWs it seems, but in model airplane engines it is the cheapest engine you can buy. They are often considered throw away engines. Nikasil cylinders can't be bored so they are a lot like Chromed aluminum cylinders. Nikasil isn't a material, it's a coating that's often applied to aluminum cylinders to improve wear resistance. Porsche Nikasiled just about every one of its cylinders at one time, and I don't think they did it because it's cheap! They did it so they could use lightweight aluminum cylinders that still have good longevity in the place of cast iron cylinders. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikasil for details. The article mentions that it fell from favor due to problems associated with high sulfur fuels, but 100LL probably doesn't have that problem. It's also somewhat tricky to apply. I'm working on a UAV engine project in which the folks that are building the engine insist that there's only one place in the world that knows how to Nikosil plate correctly. Applied incorrectly it has been known to flake off and cause real problems... Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama see KR2S project N56ML at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net -------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html ________________________________________________________________ Sent via the WebMail system at jrl-engineering.com
