There are several options available for those that want to try to make their gears last longer in high power applications. We have thousands of transmissions out there and have played with all of the common treatments. This is what we found:
Cryo Treatment
We offer this service for an extra $200 on all of our tranny rebuilds. Please Email us if you would like to add this service to your unit.
We don’t believe this works. We have seen no change in the life of the gears in our transmissions with this treatment. What cryo treating does is put the gear through a good heat treat process, but the problem is the gears were already through an excellent heat treat process when they were manufactured. This process will work for parts that were not treated originally, but in your transmission it’s already done so you are wasting money at this point.
Gear Modification Work
This is done by removing the sharp edges on the gear. This makes sense as any sharp edge on a stressed part is an area that can concentrate that stress and cause a failure. What engineers call a ‘stress concentration’ some refer to this as a ‘stress riser’. A stress concentration can cause a crack and to remove that stress concentration will help prevent failure of your gear. The problem is in order to remove these stressed areas you have to remove material. Removing material from a hardened and treated gear is risky and we believe it does more harm than good. Here is a gear that was worked on by another trans shop:
The gear teeth look great! Nice and smooth with the stress concentrations removed. The problem is it broke and this kind of break is not common to gears that are untouched, so something changed when the gear was smoothed and modified. We believe that this kind of gear work is not uniform to the gear and will create more stress concentrations at the microscopic level. It looks great to the naked eye, but it’s actually worse than from the factory. So just not doing it is the best option.
REM ISF Micropolishing
We believe this is the best thing you can do to your gears. It is a gentle polish on the gears done by machine that will smooth and remove some stress concentrations uniformly. It also polishes the gears in the area they make contact with other parts, so you have less friction loss which means less heat, better fuel economy, and longer life. This will not make your gears stronger, but with less friction there is less stress so you might see longer life from a gear after going through this process. Whether it’s worth the cost to you though is your choice.
We offer this service for all of our transmission rebuilds for $300. Please Email us if you would like this for your transmission.
Picture below of polished gears:
