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Re: The Aluminum Block Controversy..

> It seems like BMW knows HOW to do it - and it really puzzles me
> how they did it wrong on the cars. It would also seem that they
> know what they did different (there is a different name for the
> evaporated cylinder coating on bikes vs cars.. the bikes call
> it 'nickosil' for nickel-silicon.. forget what the car one is
> called, but I do recall that it has a different name..)

It appears that the coating on bikes is the same as the coating on
the V-8 engines: Nikasil.  Doing a web search I found that Nikasil is
used on the Ferrari 512 TR engine, the Jaguar XK8 V8, ZR-1 LT5, and
Espirit Turbo SE.

The Lotus glossary says:

> A permanent nickel and silicon treatment applied to aluminum.
> Creates an extremely hard, wear-resistant and durable surface.

Here's the info from one of Jim's old posts.  This explains why the V12 
engines have not had any problems.  One further note is that someone 
mentioned that Porsche has successfully used Nikasil for the past few
years in NA without problems.  Maybe on hotter air cooled engines
the sulphur isn't a problem?

> The 2.8l was to be made of Nikasil alloy, the same as used in the M60
> V-8 blocks .. this material was found incomatible with a lot of US fuels
> due to sulfur content ... so for the M60, they are going to sleeve the
> blocks in the 3.x and 4.x liter V-8's ...
>
> There is not enough "meat" in the 2.8 block to sleeve, so they are changing
> the alloy to Alusil (same as the M70 V12) which is immune to sulfur but more
> expensive ...



- --
Rod Barman, IRIS IS-6 @ Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
University of British Columbia
rodb@domain.elided