Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

I'm in the process of putting my baby together (imaculate 32 gtst)

My new turbo has been made up, intercooler, exhaust as well as a few other things, clutch, pod filter, greddy boost controller, short shift box, body kit, carbon fibre hood and new paint....

But my engine is still in pieces in my mates workshop (rb20). I am sending to an engineer i know this weekend to start working on it. The turbo i have is rated at 400-450hp, and im only going for a bit over 300hp at the wheels.

So long story short - Do i need forged pistons???????

....and what about cams and shit too, thank you

(550cc injectors are going on as well as bosch 040 fp)

Link to comment
https://www.sau.com.au/forums/topic/87708-rebuilding-engine/
Share on other sites

So long story short - Do i need forged pistons???????

I pinched these from Warspeeds posts over at CT. Hopefully it helps....

The big thing about rod stress is piston speed and piston weight. Piston speed is proportional to stroke times Rpm, so the longer stroke of the RB30 will always put it at a disadvantage at any particular Rpm to the RB25. Piston weight is entirely up to you, but forged pistons are always going to be heavier because of the shape limitations of the forging process.

Cast pistons can be made very thin and can have complicated internal ribs and re-entrant shapes. The casting mould can be constructed in several parts so it can be removed from inside the cast piston once the metal has solidified. So there is no real limitation on what shape it can be cast. Material need only be added where it adds directly to strength, so cast pistons will be the lightest pistons possible to make.

Forged pistons are made by forging dies. In other words it is a sort of stamping process. A male die is slammed into a female die and squashes the aluminium into shape. The dies must be solid and very strong, so the shape of the die inside the piston must be a very simple and slightly tapered, so it can be withdrawn after forging.

Forged pistons always have extra material around the pin bosses simply because of the way they are made. They may be stronger if the pistons are made thick, but a lot of the extra material only adds weight without extra strength. Forged pistons may be stronger, but if they are, they will always be far heavier.

The exception is very short slipper racing type pistons which are not really suitable for long life street engines.

Forged or cast, refers only the manufacturing process, it says nothing about what the material is. The TYPE of aluminium, mainly silicon content has a lot to do with strength and thermal expansion. So there is a lot more to think about than just forged versus cast.

Too many guys say "I want to fit some really cheap forgies" without knowing what they are really doing. The belief that any forged piston is superior to every cast piston for any engine is simply not true.

There are exceptions, but most manufacturers still use cast pistons, and for very good reasons. If forged pistons were far better, Ford or GM could probably mass produce forged pistons just as cheaply as cast pistons if they wanted to.

If you are planning a high Rpm street engine, and you expect it to last for a very long time without throwing a rod, think seriously about piston weight as well as just conrod strength.

I would ask them two things, what is the forged piston weight compared to a stock factory cast pistons, and what is the recommended bore clearance of the proposed new forged pistons ?

The increased weight (if any) will tell you a lot about increased conrod stress at high Rpm.

The recommended bore clearance will tell you rather a lot about piston expansion and the piston material.

If low expansion high silicon (hyper-eutectic) forged pistons are used, they will run very similar to original factory cast piston bore clearance. This is both good and bad. The good part is that they will not rattle when cold, they will seal better for both oil and blowby and the rings will be far happier for a long life street engine. The bad part is that they are made from IDENTICAL material to cast pistons, and are just as brittle. Detonation will still kill them fairly easily.

Being forged they may be a little bit stronger but only because they are heavier (more material up top) but the tradeoff is more weight.

There is a completely different material used for some forged pistons. This is low silicon aluminium. These aluminium pistons are SOFT and they expand considerably with heat. They resist detonation wonderfully well, just like rubber pistons would (hehehe). The down side is expansion, they run huge clearances when cold, they rattle and carry on, and the rings flop about and they leak bad. In a street engine you will most likely have oiling and blowby problems after a few months and a few thousand Km running.

But if you are building a short life mega horsepower drag race engine, they would be the strongest pistons available.

Just realise that the "HOT" superstrong genuine racing pistons may be a very poor choice for a long life street engine.

Find out what these "forgies" actually are.

A lot of people disagree, but I personally believe cast high silicon (factory type) pistons are best for long life street engines. Spend the money on engine management and tuning, and keep it well out of detonation.

As to what particular pistons are, It is difficult to know. Companies like Arias and Venolia make identical pistons in both materials in a large range of styles.

No forged pistons required.

The std. comp ratio of the rb20 is good.

Spend the money on some head work to get the intake and exhaust flowing better.

Deshroud the intake and exhaust valves, polish up the combustion chamber and smooth out ALL sharp edges. This improves low lift airflow and discourages detonation.

Port match and port/polish the exhaust port, smooth out the exhaust port stud lump. Suitable valve job.

Port match and port/roughen the inlet port, 3 angle valve job.

I don't know a whole lot about head work, basically spend a good 1-1.5k on headwork including the rebuild cost.

Much more spent than this goes to waste unless you are running huge 10+mm lift cams.

OR... Grab a R32 RB25DE (is able to run of the stock R32 ecu and wiring loom without mods, bolts up to everything the rb20det used), slap a set of cast RB25 pistons in to it to drop the comp ratio, leave the head stock and it will make 300hp at the wheels on 11psi with a stock rb25 turbo. ;)

Best part is, it looks 100% like a RB20DET. You cannot tell.

Edited by Cubes

see how much the guy is going to charge you for standard pistons as i did and i found a guy that sells aries forged pistons so it isn't like they are no good and they were a pretty good price. I am right in the middle of a rebuild myself i am hoping to reach 250rwkw not sure of bhp and there were a alot of people that were not going to rebuild it with out them in the end it only cost me about $400 more to get the forged piston and ring so it was a pretty good investment in my mind up to you really. If you want send me a PM and i will give you his number he is in melbourne but he does ship out of state i think

Providing you are up for a set of pistons because your old ones are mashed or stuff then the forged items is probably worth it.

Thats what I did.. If I didn't have to buy new pistons I wouldn't have worried about forged and stuck with the stock items.

Generally, if the power you are making warrants forged pistons, it also warrants forged rods. ;)

Blueprinting is really just a word which means you check things instead of simply slapping it together without measuring it.

Blueprinting is simply double checking everything, setting up everything perfectly, i.e squish, bearing clearances, piston/bore clearances etc.

balancing is a good idea it will iron out some roughness when getting into it.. it has on mine and i got the pistons, rods, crank, balancer and flywheel balanced.. feels like it revs much quicker. I also got the crank linished/polished which just gets rid of some of the sharper bits on the running surfaces on the crank. I used arias pistons and crower rods.

Generally, if the power you are making warrants forged pistons, it also warrants forged rods. :P

I CRY FOR A MOTION OF DISMISSAL... thats a shocking comment lol :P:P:P

Forgies with a set of GTR rods pumps 400rwkw safely...

And they arent forged rods...

Generally if you wanna change and go higher rev limits then rods come into it

all hail my new fav icon :):):)

Basically the assembly procedures (which include all the checking & measuring, resizing, surface finishing, balancing etc) should be consistant with the rest of the build. ie if its just a quick and nasty slap together job then you are probably not going to take it too far, however if its a full on no expense spared high rpm race engine then you are going to be pretty thorough.

Your engine builder should be able to tell you what is appropriate for the engine you are building.

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • First up, I wouldn't use PID straight up for boost control. There's also other control techniques that can be implemented. And as I said, and you keep missing the point. It's not the ONE thing, it's the wrapping it up together with everything else in the one system that starts to unravel the problem. It's why there are people who can work in a certain field as a generalist, IE a IT person, and then there are specialists. IE, an SQL database specialist. Sure the IT person can build and run a database, and it'll work, however theyll likely never be as good as a specialist.   So, as said, it's not as simple as you're thinking. And yes, there's a limit to the number of everything's in MCUs, and they run out far to freaking fast when you're designing a complex system, which means you have to make compromises. Add to that, you'll have a limited team working on it, so fixing / tweaking some features means some features are a higher priority than others. Add to that, someone might fix a problem around a certain unrelated feature, and that change due to other complexities in the system design, can now cause a new, unforseen bug in something else.   The whole thing is, as said, sometimes split systems can work as good, and if not better. Plus when there's no need to spend $4k on an all in one solution, to meet the needs of a $200 system, maybe don't just spout off things others have said / you've read. There's a lot of misinformation on the internet, including in translated service manuals, and data sheets. Going and doing, so that you know, is better than stating something you read. Stating something that has been read, is about as useful as an engineering graduate, as all they know is what they've read. And trust me, nearly every engineering graduate is useless in the real world. And add to that, if you don't know this stuff, and just have an opinion, maybe accept what people with experience are telling you as information, and don't keep reciting the exact same thing over and over in response.
    • How complicated is PID boost control? To me it really doesn't seem that difficult. I'm not disputing the core assertion (specialization can be better than general purpose solutions), I'm just saying we're 30+ years removed from the days when transistor budgets were in the thousands and we had to hem and haw about whether there's enough ECC DRAM or enough clock cycles or the interrupt handler can respond fast enough to handle another task. I really struggle to see how a Greddy Profec or an HKS EVC7 or whatever else is somehow a far superior solution to what you get in a Haltech Nexus/Elite ECU. I don't see OEMs spending time on dedicated boost control modules in any car I've ever touched. Is there value to separating out a motor controller or engine controller vs an infotainment module? Of course, those are two completely different tasks with highly divergent requirements. The reason why I cite data sheets, service manuals, etc is because as you have clearly suggested I don't know what I'm doing, can't learn how to do anything correctly, and have never actually done anything myself. So when I do offer advice to people I like to use sources that are not just based off of taking my word for it and can be independently verified by others so it's not just my misinterpretation of a primary source.
    • That's awesome, well done! Love all these older Datsun / Nissans so rare now
    • As I said, there's trade offs to jamming EVERYTHING in. Timing, resources etc, being the huge ones. Calling out the factory ECU has nothing to do with it, as it doesn't do any form of fancy boost control. It's all open loop boost control. You mention the Haltech Nexus, that's effectively two separate devices jammed into one box. What you quote about it, is proof for that. So now you've lost flexibility as a product too...   A product designed to do one thing really well, will always beat other products doing multiple things. Also, I wouldn't knock COTS stuff, you'd be surprised how many things are using it, that you're probably totally in love with As for the SpaceX comment that we're working directly with them, it's about the type of stuff we're doing. We're doing design work, and breaking world firsts. If you can't understand that I have real world hands on experience, including in very modern tech, and actually understand this stuff, then to avoid useless debates where you just won't accept fact and experience, from here on, it seems you'd be be happy I (and possibly anyone with knowledge really) not reply to your questions, or input, no matter how much help you could be given to help you, or let you learn. It seems you're happy reading your data sheets, factory service manuals, and only want people to reinforce your thoughts and points of view. 
    • I don't really understand because clearly it's possible. The factory ECU is running on like a 4 MHz 16-bit processor. Modern GDI ECUs have like 200 MHz superscalar cores with floating point units too. The Haltech Nexus has two 240 MHz CPU cores. The Elite 2500 is a single 80 MHz core. Surely 20x the compute means adding some PID boost control logic isn't that complicated. I'm not saying clock speed is everything, but the requirements to add boost control to a port injection 6 cylinder ECU are really not that difficult. More I/O, more interrupt handlers, more working memory, etc isn't that crazy to figure out. SpaceX if anything shows just how far you can get arguably doing things the "wrong" way, ie x86 COTS running C++ on Linux. That is about as far away from the "correct" architecture as it gets for a real time system, but it works anyways. 
×
×
  • Create New...