Cleaning and pre-honing / welding of cylinders at PowerSeal.

After your cylinder as described in article 1 has been "checked in" at PowerSeal, we will now start working on the actual operation.

The cylinder is cleaned in various chemical baths and ultrasonic processes to remove street dirt, oil and grease. The old NiKaSil layer will be removed from the cylinder by immersing it in a special acid bath for a few hours. This bath only removes the old NiKaSil layer but does not affect the aluminum. It is therefore important that all non-aluminum parts are removed or masked to prevent damage.

Once the old layer has been removed, the cylinder is made chemically clean again and blasted with glass pearl.
After this process, the cylinder is checked for damage that needs welding. This is important when applying the layer because we want to start with a cylinder that is round and straight and has no damage any more.

In this phase we split the cylinders into two sections.

The cylinder that needs welding and the cylinder that does not need welding.

After being rounded and straightened by honing, the cylinder that doesn’t need welding is chemically degreased to remove the honey oil and is blasted with glass pearl again. The cylinder will be measured with a micrometer to calculate the NiKaSil layer that need to be applied. This requires high-quality measuring equipment and is measured in an air-conditioned room with a constant temperature of 20 degrees. The cylinder then will be forwarded to the NiKaSil department according to the intern PowerSeal planning.

The cylinder that does need welding is sent to the welding department after he has been degreased and glass pearl blasted.

In the welding department the damage is assessed and milled deeper to get a pure aluminum surface. Any serious damage to the head and / or foot or cylinder ports are examined with extra care, because this is important for the performance of the cylinder.

The milled cylinder is preheated to approximately 200 degrees and then welded or, if necessary, welded on more than one spot to cover the entire cylinder damage.

After the cylinder has cooled off, it goes to the boring department.
In the boring department, the surplus of welds are removed. Depending on where the welding is done, the porting then is manually machined and on the lathe the head or foot welding is removed.

After all these actions, the cylinder in the honing department is pre-cleaned and honed, once again chemically cleaned and glass-blasted.

After these treatments, the cylinder will be measured before applying the NiKaSil layer.

As all these operations have been completed with the utmost care, the cylinder proceeds to the next phase in our production process0.

Phase 3. NiKaSil coating, honing , check-up and last control.

Stay tuned on Facebook and soon read how Phase 3 is being implemented at the PowerSeal factory.

To be continued.