Swain Coating

[Aaron LaBeau]

From: "Raymond A. Kawski" <sr20de@epix.net>

Frank Orozco wrote:

>> It has not been a problem on my car.  I have had the
>> turbine/manifold/downpipe "White Lightning" coated for quite some time

>It's possible that the bigger turbos don't have this happen to them but
>us *TINY* turbo guys it does.

Haha, what are you trying to call mine small ;-)

Kojima already chimed in on one of the problems with the Swain White
Lightening; I don't think it does well under the thermal expansion of my
stainless manifold.

The flaking started after beating on the car during the road race portion of
the 2002 Convention.  I took the car to Streets of Willow in December and
didn't notice any additional flaking.

The engineers at Swain also told me that the White Lightening coating
reaches it's limit around 1500 degrees.  I checked with an EGT on an 18 psi
blast; towards 7K RPM the EGT's were in this range.  So I may be finding the
limit of the coating with my setup.

I measured the areas that have flaked with the pyrometer after a couple of
blasts up the street and it's still in around the 260 range on the outside.
Truly an amazing coating really considering the temperature difference
between the outside of the coating and the inside.  Despite the flaking I
would still coat the manifold this way if I had to do it over again.  It's
ugly but extremely functional.

Aaron