Improving Dai Yoshihara’s Formula Drift Engine Wear With WPC Treatment!

,

What appears to be scoring on the journals is simply burnishing of the WPC treated surface, and it has no dimension, just a different look to the surface.

The crank can simply be Magnafluxed, WPC’ed and reused with no problems. To be safe, we are going to replace the crank, as it has seen 3 years of Formula Drift abuse. Thanks to WPC, it has never had to be machined before!

 

A really close look to show the burnishing as much as possible. It is hard to believe that this is a 3-year-old crank!

The only damage that we caught just in time was that the Crower Roller rockers were starting to pit on the exhaust side. The rollers are not WPC treated because we cannot disassemble them.

The exhaust pitting is because the exhaust valve must open against a turbo motor’s increased pressure, which puts a lot more load on the exhaust side of the valvetrain. Thanks to WPC treatment, the exhaust lobes of the cam still had zero wear even with the pitted rollers!

 

Here is a close view of the exhaust roller pitting. Extended use might have caused further damage and possibly damaged the cam. To combat this, we will be running Crowers Extreme Heavy Duty version of these roller lifters that have increased oil flow to the roller.

Overall, I would say that WPC treatment is one of the main factors involved with more than doubling this engine’s service life. This makes it worth its weight in gold. WPC is a cheap investment- especially when compared to the cost of just about any other part of the engine!

We will continue to use WPC Treatment in any part that moves and has the potential of metal to metal contact or wearing against another metal part in the future. We can safely say that WPC saves money not only in parts consumption, but for less tangible issues like the cost of not finishing and the impact on a program that not finishing can have.

Due to its relatively low cost, we would use WPC to extend the life of and reduce friction in anything from street builds to as serious and as high stake Motorsports as it can get!

 

Sources

WPC Treatment

King Bearings

JE Pistons

2 comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*
*