Andy being a 2nd Generation Mariner might know something about this, but we had a Racing Fanatic Engineer friend who worked with my dad and I to build up our racing hemi engines. He started racing at about 16 years old, and he was about 30 when we met up with him. Anyway, he used to drop his project engines in salt water to rust them up for a year or more, before he machined them. He claimed that the cast iron would harden better and expand less under heat. He ran fuellers and usually won. Never blew a block. Any body heard of that?
I should know this, as I am actually a metals researcher, but I don't know directly. I could look it up if nobody knows. But can you tell me what you mean by fuellers? I thought immidiately (I always write this word wrong :banghead3 of TFd or TFFC, but I can't imagine to never blow a block in those cars! I can remember once we were at Santapod Raceway in England at the European Finals. Our race was over, so we started to bbq and our trailer was behind a fence almost next to the finish line. The TF class still had to do a last qualifing round and one of them threw a rod close to the finish line and ended 30cm next to the bbq, smoking and all!!!
Norman seems to me that there wouldn't be any good after soaking a year of salt water. Did he happen to say what type of salt water (ocean or what?)
Fuellers ran High-Octane Racing fuel and many added nitrogen boosters to kick off. I think some drag-strips wouldn't allow the nitrogen over the years.
No fresh water and rock salt. He claimed that it the oxidation worked something like what happens when you weld cast iron, where the welds are, and makes similar harder surfaces for a few microns (VTH - very thin hairs ).
You lost me here. I don't think we are talking about the same thing, but don't use a lot of dragrace classes nitrogen? I mean, our Pro-mod runs high octane (117?) with nitrogen. But I really doubt the salt water trick. It would only influence the top, corroded layer, which would be lost after machining. The welding phenomenum you described is caused by the rapid cooling after the heating up. This causes the metal crystals not to have time enough to settle and results mostly in harder and more brittle metal. The change in expansion would be very strange, as the salt water would only change the top surface, which in my opinion would not influence the expansion as this is caused by the whole block.
That sounds logical. He told us this when we were rebuilding the Hemi-engines. It came out because he said the engines were so big that they wouldn't fit in a barrel, even on end. We asked why that was a problem, since they were made to mount horizontal, and he told about his block seasoning 'trick'. We never blew these big blocks, either.
