On the best day of its life, a piston’s job sucks pretty hard. There is extreme heat, fire, all kinds of directional changes and generally speaking, the things just get tormented. Believe it or not, it only gets worse from there. Guys adding forced induction, nitrous, and whatever other power adders into the mix increase all of those stresses a multitude of times and when not treated properly, even the best of slugs, like those made by Mahle can suffer the ill effects. Among the maladies that can befall an abused piston is microwelding. This is when the rings and the piston actually start to attach themselves in cases of extreme heat and friction. Mahle has been running a series of videos that go through piston failure analysis and address a variety of topics. This time it is the evils of microwelding, why it happens, and how to prevent it in some sense.
When building an engine for performance, pistons are one of the items that can be pricey and that’s because they are precision machined, made out of different alloys, and are very specific for what you are trying to accomplish. The wrong piston for the job will result in an engine that does not perform to your expectation nor will it live for the expected amount of time as well. In this video, Mahle talks about that and it talks about the specifics of microwelding. We found this pretty fascinating because while we are familiar with guys collapsing ring lands, shattering or straight up melting pistons, we did not have near the knowledge we should have on this subject. Mahle took us to school…you should attend as well!
