Heat coating on pistons

dvogtvpe · #1 09-05-2013, 09:55 AM

A lot of people ask me about heat coating pistons. Is it worth it? Are there horsepower gains? Will it save my engine if it lean's out?

Years ago (25 maybe), we started playing with heat coated pistons. Poly moly on the skirt and ceramic on the dome. This was way before we had a dyno or any kind of data acquisition equipment. We had trouble on our nitro engine scoring out the bore. Only a 55% load. It saved us several pistons. then when we started running nitrous on our 2 cycle snowmobiles after one particular bad melt down we went with them in those engines. I think we burned a hole in one of them but that was a driver who was winning a race and wouldn't back off and temps were up over 1700 deg.
This past weekend, I was talking to a friend who had built a 30 cube on over 80% load of nitro. We were reviewing his run on his Digitron exhaust temps were good through out the run until it started to pull down into the torque band and the rapidly jumped to nearly 1750 deg, We both started laughing and he told me it was a good thing he put heat coated pistons in.

So, I guess its just a tip, piston coatings give you a safe margin. Typically 1500 deg you would start to do damage to the piston or bore. Doing dyno runs I've never seen a gain in horse power but I've never taken the time to tune a engine in without and do a piston only swap and document it either. any actual gains I always figured were from other changes that were done to the engine.

Nightow1 · #2 09-05-2013, 11:14 AM

neat little bit of information,

austin8214 · #3 09-05-2013, 07:01 PM

Thanks Don

CumminSHO · #4 10-21-2015, 10:29 PM

That's a good bit of information. I'm still green with tuning and playing with these Kohler but that was well worth my time . Thank you for that tip.

bocephus1991 · #5 10-21-2015, 11:41 PM

Interesting! How do you heat coat a piston? Just curious, I know nothing about this sort of thing.

CumminSHO · #6 10-22-2015, 10:52 PM

Good question because I was wondering the same thing sir

dvogtvpe · #7 10-23-2015, 07:04 PM

send them to swain tech or a number of other place's. or buy a kit to do it yourself

olds45512 · #8 10-24-2015, 08:12 AM

I did some looking into this last night and it looks like it cost between $25 or $45 per piston depending on what you want done.

dvogtvpe · #9 10-24-2015, 11:50 AM

you can dump a couple hundred bucks pretty quick, coat the top of the piston, skirt, inside chamber of the head, exhaust pipe, cam , lifters,

Sam Mac · #10 10-24-2015, 02:15 PM

Just be glad your not paying the bills to coat a Na$crap Cup engine.