I Rented a $35,000 X-RAY Machine to scan the metal used in Rotary Engines

we want to make more horsepower have you ever wondered why certain types of aluminum bend so easily and other ones don't at all this is definitely a science experiment but i'm going to show you some really cool things about metals and what are used inside of engines to make a lot of power traditionally stock engines use a lot of steel or cast iron that's this piece here these are mazda rotary engines that's a cast on your surface but that's no longer the hot ticket so the hot item is aluminum but aluminum can't hold up to the abrasiveness that steel or cast iron can so they started making coatings on there well this is part of my billet four rotor and we're gonna figure out what type of coating this is this is also a billet forward this is another aluminum piece but again it's coated with something we don't know what this is a really expensive science experiment you guys get to watch it for free i get to rent the 35 000 unit to test this let's start with real quick basic obviously this is aluminum it's very lightweight awesome can be very malleable very cheap easy to recycle titanium is actually a very similar weight but much stronger finally we get to our steels which is mostly made out of iron some carbon and some other ingredients which is our question of today why steel why iron why titanium white aluminum and why aren't these in just the raw elements this is not just aluminum this piece of aluminum is actually 6061 you'll hear that phrase a lot or 5000 series 6000 series what makes that series and how can we measure it i just rented a very expensive machine and oddly enough this machine is used by pawn stars pond shops everywhere use this type of machine so this vanta olympus thing olympus also used to make cameras at least this thing is a handheld x-ray scanner it's called an xrf so x-ray radio frequency and the concept is really simple different elements give off different frequencies when they're hit with energy if you burn something in a fire the color also tells you what sort of elements same thing energy given off this does it with x-rays so i'm sure i don't want to point this at my head when i do this we're going to x-ray things and this machine will then collect the energy that comes back out of these things and tell us exactly what type of elements are in the thing we're scanning so we're going to start with the simple stuff and go up from there this thing is about 30 to 35 000 so i do not want to drop it it looks like a pretty sweet gun gotta love technology this stuff would be unknown to us we wouldn't know what metals were dealing with specifically and what i'm looking for today is hopefully figuring out cool we know this is aluminum but what else is in it we know this is tungsten or silicone or whatever chromium what else is in it so this makes sense to me definitely radiation we are ready to test it it's going to take maybe 30 seconds to a minute we're gonna start with metals we know and compare it to known data so i'm gonna go ahead and press and hold this and it is currently x-raying that took a lot less time than 30 seconds wow look at that pb is lead so we have 0.002 percent of lead we have zinc manganese chromium copper i think that's copper iron and then le which should be aluminum let's take a look at what aluminum 6061 is that's a known number there's a reason for this this is very interesting this might not be 6061. i'm gonna go ahead and see if this is actually the right aluminum but we're gonna go ahead and test the titanium next just to get used to this machine now we're going to scan the titanium so you can see right now that is 95 percent titanium almost 96. v it was a vanadium it's four percent vanadium and then point three percent iron let's look at what ta17 is you can already see why this becomes so important adding aluminum adding vanadium steel or iron really to titanium changes its properties and if this was on a spaceship for example aerospace grade or out in outer space you need to know how much it can bend before it breaks how rigid it is elasticity how much it's corrosion resistant all these different extra elements make a massive change if you don't believe me guess what less than two percent carbon does to iron that's where you start getting steel and if you guys have ever played with just raw iron it shatters into all these little crumbles but when you start adding some carbon not too much it starts becoming steel and that's where you get bolts and chromoly steel tube which actually has chromium molbidium which we'll test so this is the steel that we use on the four rotor as all of its structure so we want to make sure that this is 4130 chromoly steel chromoly is chromium and molbidium plus iron and a little bit of carbon so we should see at least those four ingredients plus a couple more let's see what we get just as expected this is 98.3 iron then there's chromium so we're seeing just a point eight percent amount of chromium in there and then manganese copper molybdenum and nickel that is what should make up 4130 so we're going to actually compare this one since we know this one absolutely we're going to compare 4130 to this compensation this is the steel you use on just about every chassis and here we go we've got about 0.8 to 1.1 percent of chromium and we're at 0.8 manganese 0.4 to 0.6 manganese is 0.48 carbon i don't see carbon in here and i don't see silicon in here molbidium 0.15 to 0.25 0.16 and we don't see sulfur or phosphorus and some of these ingredients can't be measured with this machine by the way carbon we would look at that 0.28 percent carbon the point is all the other things line up with this list that is awesome absolutely insane so that's steel which is mostly iron let's see something that's even more iron literally the iron's in an iron block i'm going to measure out here just in case this surface has any sort of treating on it we're going to measure the iron and see what it tells us i don't expect it to be 100 and there we go we've got some interesting information even though it's considered cast iron and it may still be it's still 98 iron manganese copper chromium and what is that sn i should know that one you guys already know that make fun of me it's tin i think this has my head spinning i'm filming it as we go and we're realizing that there's a lot of different type of cheaper understandably cheap chinese versions of aluminum we are going to test a gold standard right here this is bought here in the united states it's 7075 so it has to be this t77075 it's a certain type of aluminum it's what my rear control arms are made out of i've cleaned this area off with acetone we're going gonna see do we get what is 7075 from what is labeled 7075. 7075 when we go to test it should obviously be mostly aluminum silicon iron copper manganese magnesium chromium five to six percent zinc which is the important part a little bit of titanium so let's see what happens six percent zinc that is basically the key differentiator of what 7075 is or 7000 series tends to have a lot of zinc there's tons of copper iron chromium titanium manganese i don't see magnesium but that's whatever so this is exactly it's reading we have now verified that this machine works obviously hopefully it would what that means to me is that i bought 7075 actually from industrial metal here and i'll say that because it's good that they sold me 70 75 i machined 70 75 so the properties that i see listed about how strong it is with say like holding threads so my arms don't rip out not these the a arms that's very important so we now know for sure that the whole rear suspension is all done in the proper aluminum so we know aluminum now we've learned it we can see it with this machine clear as day nobody can lie to us tell us this quality metal and it's cheap we know exactly what we're getting but that keeps me safe we want to make more horsepower so let's start with the irons let's affectionately name this now this machine as we've learned cannot measure carbon when you see the results keep in mind that but this is straight up iron so let's see what properties are in this cast iron here as expected it does have some alloys in it some other metals manganese copper which is very interesting it's 0.7 copper that tells me that it's not a traditional metal chromium tin and then nickel so the nickel does tell me there's a cast element to this because you actually repair cast with a lot of nickel and we can't read the amount of carbon but that's not what we got this machine for now we got there let's see what the surfaces that replicate this are on my billet irons this is made out of aluminum off camera i did scan it and it didn't make sense this is not 7075 aluminum most billet irons are made out of that this when we put it up to here again cleaned off and measured the aluminum it's a zl108 which is a chinese aluminum it does not have nearly amount of zinc 0.05 percent instead of five to six percent so this is not a 70 75 plate it's good to know that okay i'm using this cheaper metal we might be able to use that in the future might be cheaper we're both learning this together this threw me off completely because this is not and you'll see guys like billet pro some of the other billet irons use 7075 so just full disclosure but that's half of it the tungsten or whatever this surface is has to be hard enough to replicate this or wear equivalent to this this is aluminum aluminum would be gone within a couple rotations of the engine this is a sprayed on either plasma or whatever the case is super hot it's actually embedded into the surface of this aluminum and then ground down let's see what it is this is the moment that's i've been dying to know as i would have bet i would have placed money on this hands down w is tungsten it's 85 tungsten the next one is actually cobalt and it's 10 cobalt and that is very important to me because that's the specific type of tungsten carbide that we're using on this then we've got five percent chromium a little bit of iron and nickel to top it off so now that we know this we can work with these to make an even better stronger version so why am i showing you this this is almost the secret sauce for somebody else's secret sauce for me i could make tons of power and keep you guys out of the dark you know that's not what i'm about and i'll be honest there have been so many rotary shops that have just pissed me off i i could be way more angry than i am right now but the point is is that i never wanted to be held hostage by anybody i hate that in the rotary community and i know that you guys that have owned rotary cars can relate even just a little bit people love to hold you hostage i am sharing everything i find i've rented a very expensive machine because i want answers yes it took me a 50 60 000 cnc machine to prevent paying a thousand dollars to somebody else but you know what they can't hold me back anymore and now that i know this i'm making my own irons so that way if i scratch one i can have my spare engines i'm not playing political games i'm just using raw tools to progress the ability of the rotary engine the rotary engine has been held back to me by all the drag racers and all those guys that try to hide what they do i get it i get that but we're in a different era and the engine's going the way of the dodo even the way of that saying that's not even a common saying anymore i want to standardize at least a basic level of what works so everything's on the table yes i'm going to go into production making my own irons but you're going to see me testing that and adjusting this you can adjust them on a cobalt you can adjust the amount of nickel you can adjust them out of tungsten obviously you could add more chromium chromium's harder and a little bit more abrasive at times so it's harder to grind but it can handle higher temperatures there's all these little bits of adjustments that change just how that surface will handle i'm going to keep improving it keep taking it a step further and no i'm not ripping off somebody else i'm literally making my own product but i'm one of the first guys to test this ever we need to see how this works that brings me to my next thing is that in the sake of sharing information again this information if i rented this machine if i was if i was anybody else but me this information is gold to know for myself but this is really cool so i also have this is slightly older this is both a cast and then machined iron from racing beat and they use a different surface and i'm using this side it's already cleaned off and prepped because this side took a beating and so my buddy logan at define sent me this because we were both super curious what is that material that's clearly different and there was a craze a couple of years ago about cermet ceramic metallic options surmat stir mastermind you heard that all day long and that was supposed to replace everything else and then it kind of died off so this is very fascinating this is actually basically the other major option cr is chromium so this is basically a chromium carbide maybe i won't call it carbide but definitely chromium and that might be where it gets the ceramic aspect of it 75 chromium 24 nickel it's basically chromium and nickel everything else is just minor bonuses but look at that chromium nickel and that's that surface you can see how wildly different these two are and yet they can still accomplish similar goals i'm going to take the tungsten approach it's honestly better i don't have experience with the chromium one but in theory chromium could be even better but that's what i'm going to test between videos this isn't stuff that you guys are going to see oh test this one that's scratched harder that's not an interesting video i'll just show you the results as we go on just like the fact that this iron here is out because this wear right here look at that i don't know how thick this surface is and we're gonna find that out but you can't feel that right there but you can certainly see that it's changed properties and i think that's partially because of oil starvation and so the rings were just being sucked down because an insane vacuum here sucking that against there so it's metal on this it feels smoother i don't want to send stuff back and forth across the country have ups lose it i have people play politics i want to know how to machine because i've got i've done all the math for all of this you guys see the three rotor everything else is machined for this i just need to know what this surface is and now we do there's companies here that do this very well and they've got their own versions and proprietary formulas and all that i don't care i just want what works i got my trigger discipline on i'm treating it like a real gun where you don't point at things you don't intend to destroy it i like joel so i'm not going to destroy him with x-ray but that was the point of the video that's why i spent almost a thousand dollars renting this damn thing but while we're here let's do some really fun things so the next final frontier for rotaries is actually the most commonly replaced part and that is actually the housing this is not made out of billet there are very few people trying to do that and they've not really had much success because you see them teasing it and then they just disappear here's one of the reasons why i already know this but i want to show you guys this fits just perfectly holy crap it's actually like a hexa chromium being in detroit there's you'll see like occasional like emergency situations where like this green or red slime starts falling through the city and it's actually hexachromium really bad stuff really bad it's controlled by the epa understandably but that internal surface is chromium so it's 99 chromium and i don't know if these are just traced from in my shop i still cleaned it off but it's a chromium surface and like i said you can look up like hexachromium absolutely whatever that is not something that a person like me somebody like pack somebody that size even the guys here you can't do that you'd have to be a massive oem supplier and even now like i said the epa and those guys are so hardcore about this stuff because it's bad for the environment to make people are moving away from that on the end of the spectrums what you have here is this is basically pure chromium and you can see it the little insert the chromium is right to there it goes to aluminum even the guys making these billet irons all the different ones honestly kind of come from the oem original plant use aluminum outers and then make a harder surface for the apex seals to ride along almost pure chromium we have chromium and other stuff and then we have tungsten a little bit of chromium so you can see the tungsten chromiums you know are coming into play here one of the things i'm going to try and work on in my spare time is making billet housings i see other people doing it i don't know anything about their projects i wish them well i just want to help push the market forward make a true full billet engine it's going to come down to that surface making it feasible all that other but yeah this inside part is chromium the out part is cool tungsten carbide chromium cobalt nickel all that wonderful but none of that means unless you talk about the part that everybody normally makes fun of the apex seal this has to play nice with those surfaces the side surfaces actually really don't interact with the apex seal as much chromium on the inside of this certainly does this is chromium what are the apex seals and so what i have here and this is kind of infamous sign of a stock apex seal more brittle but harder you know brittle and hardness kind of kind of go hand in hand there's there's some exceptions but that little tip broke off so that's stock two-piece apex seals we're gonna test those i'm not gonna name any of these because that's not the point of this if you recognize them ignore it this is what was in the three-rotor for all those years i've then swapped to these and i think that these are also in the four order we'll test that in a second and then these i'm going to be using in a two rotor 1000 horsepower build so each of these are slightly different but when you talk about ones in this realm or really all the aftermarket ones talk about being unbreakable or they bend instead of breaking because that breaking that little chip then goes to the motor and destroys the rest of the housing what does that mean in terms of metal oh i took out two each and this might not work i don't know yet and also take in mind i tried cleaning off the surfaces but there could be more in there so this is my used stock apex seals mostly iron and then they have interesting amount of zinc mobidium nickel and so on noticing that iron is 92 percent and zinc is 3 percent and so on let's see what the aftermarket seals start to do very interesting zinc isn't anywhere to be found on aftermarket seal on this one more chromium which to me would suggest you know harder surface implying that it might not eat up the housings as much but oddly enough this brand is rumored my housings were trash but i also never ran an air filter these were rumored to be difficult on housing now this actually kind of confirms the thing and we'll go through the next ones in a second that's one percent chromium this is chromium if you have two like metals it's more likely to wear this so this stock apex seals are not chrome they're zinc which is a very soft metal and iron which is soft by itself that's going to wear the apex seal before this surface really wears we already see some chromium that makes sense why aftermarket seals would be more likely to wear the housings let's see if that's constant through all of these so here we are the current three rotor apex seals we get a little bit of a different story iron manganese copper now there's a little baby bit of chromium so it has less chromium than the other one finally the last one have a very good reputation it's saying hey it's exactly a certain type of metal that's mostly iron manganese and then titanium well this has all been mind blowing but there is one more final thing the most iconic thing we need to test with my handy dandy problem solver right here and that's the rotor itself i'm curious you know it's cast it's obviously iron it's not steel this is brand new let's see what happens goodbye holy crap 85 iron tons of zinc manganese and chromium that zinc very interesting as you can tell i am not happy with the current state of the rotary engine i know that it's a dying market i don't plan anything other than that i don't think it'll be revived i don't think any like that but what i do believe is that what smaller community it is needs to have some basic standards so that way we know this is how you make power this is how you save money you don't need all this other frivolous this works this has this you saw right now facts not opinion not like i mean you can take the apex seal information take that information as you want and it's not you can see it all for yourself i'm a huge fan of management by measurement and we have all this information now that can help us make even stronger rotary engines

Channel: Rob Dahm

Views: 41,381

Rating: 4.9662604 out of 5

Keywords: Custom & Performance Vehicles, Mazda, Sports Cars, Vehicle Modification & Tuning, Vehicle Parts & Accessories, Engine & Transmission, High Performance & Aftermarket Auto Parts, Vehicle Wheels & Tires, Used Vehicles, Vehicle Specs Reviews & Comparisons, Transmission Repair & Maintenance, Batteries, Brakes, Interior, Vehicle Fuels & Lubricants, Collision & Auto Body Repair, Oil Changes, Auto Glass Repair & Replacement, California, Rob Dahm, RX7, Hybrid & Alternative Vehicles

Id: cL3mpkwbpVc

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021