Shot peening
the best post production way to strengthen
metal and when it comes to transmission gears you can not get the increases in strength and
durability that shot peening brings from any other
process period. The most demanding applications, where failure is
not an option, use shot peeing to increase the service
life of the component. Be it aircraft aircraft landing
gear, the compressor/turbine blades in a jet engine or the
connecting rods that are inside your racy engine, they are all
shot peened. Why? Because if you need to make it stronger,
but can't add more mass or make a material change to the
part, then shot peening is the best solution.
Shot
peening is a cold metal working post process which is done
to the gears to make them tougher and last longer. The
gears are stacked onto a mandrel and loaded into our shot peening machine that uses
40HP worth of
compressed air to hurl the highest quality of specially conditioned
cut-wire steel shot available at the
gear. As the shot strikes the gear it
peens the surface, leaving
very small indentations or dimples. These overlapping dimples develop an
even layer of metal in residual compressive stress. This compressive stress
is a good thing for it is well known fact that cracks will not initiate or
propagate in a compressively stressed zone, such as the root radius of the
gear teeth, where nearly all gear teeth failures start. Rule of
thumb: shot peened gears generally act like they are 20-25% larger in cross
section and raise the fatigue limit over 25 percent. Try to get that kind of improvement in
strength without having to change the material of the gear!
This car has used our transmission for over 3 years
without failure.
Four years ago we quietly started sending parts out to get shot peened.
The results were amazing, gear tooth breakage issues seemed to vanish while at
the same time the surface finish of the gear teeth were looking like new even
after a season of use. Realizing the benefits from shot peening and how much
we
was spending to have parts shipped out to get done, we had to get one of those machines. After
looking for nearly a year one finally showed up at an auction that was
specially built for a college university and that’s what TRE is using to shot
peen. Recently we
decided to not only shot peen the parts that we use inside our transmissions
but to start shot peening all the highly stressed gears that we
sell. The reason for this is because most people are wanting to build a
stronger transmission but haven't heard of shot peening or they don't realize just how good
of a service shot peening really is in the first place. If you're looking to
rebuild your transmission you should buy your parts from us because they now come shot
peened and will prevent your transmission from giving up the ghost before you've had a
chance to completely kick its ass.
The
Vaccu-Blast shot peener is not
to be confused with an ordinary shot blaster at an engine
shop. This
is a special piece of equipment that was designed and built for
the job of shot peening gears. It is calibrated to provide
the correct level of intensity, shot pattern and coverage
of the work piece.
We do a 2 stage process and use premium quality specially-conditioned
& sorted cut-wire steel shot.
This is ideal for shot peening gears because of it's
uniform size and roundness.
The shot peening machine is semi-automatic allowing precise control
over all parameters for perfectly shot peened gears every
time.
Want to know more about shot peening? Click
here.
There
are many parts inside the transmission that can be
strengthened from shot peening:
