Kevin Rutherfrauds $200000 Signature glider truck has complete engine failure!!!

I guess I'm to old school. I was taught never touch the insert face with your fingers or a rag, so I can't stand the thought of putting any thing on them but oil. Atomic bond or not when coating comes off it's either going to be in flakes or grit form neither is good. Also ideally there is a film of oil between bearing and crank the entire time engine is running. Tell me how the micro blue helps that?

As as far as using it on hub bearings, differentials etc I think a properly adjusted timken with the right viscosity oil and there isn't enough difference to talk about. The problem with hub bearings is most get tgem to tight they don't have faith in the lock. This truck was micro blued and low resistance tired out the ying ying I'm not impressed by the numbers. Factory trucks produce those naturally we can't know his driving habits and you can't perform a study with one test subject. However you can test one subject to see if a study is viable.

 

Correction to a detail of my last post: my mother informs me that my father's molybdenum disulfide patent was licensed in perpetuity to Pratt and Whitney in 1961, with sublicensing rights. Payments from the licensing agreement ended on my father's death in 2003, at which point the patent completely transferred to Pratt and Whitney and/or its parent company. I am also told that because of some similarities to my father's patent, there were periodic payments to my father from the patent holders of the tungsten disulfide process. Learn something new every day I guess.

 

I've read numerous threads on the microblue (wheel bearing) topic and found just as many people happy with them and reporting the coating intact after 100's of thousands of miles as others that were unhappy and/or noted the coating worn off on disassembly. Nothing definitive either way, and of course some debate regarding the failures about axle flex, bearing preload, and so on.

Nothing scientific of course. For that matter, not even real world testimonials backed up with pictures or video. This is the signature of the snake oil products, even if the stuff is actually as special as advertised. If you have the money to create, produce, and market the stuff, how hard would it be to build a simple test rig and prove it? Rig up a scrap wheel end on a roller and a press. Apply 17T on it and spin it 100,000 miles and see what's in there at the end. That would be the first thing I'd do before going to market, but that's just me being held back with my ethics.

Regarding engine bearing coatings, I know of only one example that's apparently successful. A guy on FB with over 200k on it I think, and is happy with it and firmly in the 9+ mpg club, maybe even 10+. He's microblued everything along with a ton of other add-on enhancements, so impossible to tell if the engine bearings made a difference or how much, or if the coatings even still on them. He's making money with it, so not inclined to tear it down to see if the rod and main bearings are still blue.

In any event, I haven't seen enough evidence to consider it any further. In fact, I'd go a little further to speculate that the main benefit of the microblue process is the polishing they do, not so much the coating.

 

True. One would think that no matter how slick the microblue was, the friction between it and the oil would still be far higher the friction within the oil itself, and really wouldn't change the mechanics of the oil film and it's multiple layers. And that's where the friction is, within oil film and the various layers moving at different speeds.

But supposing it did reduce the friction below the level of the oil film friction. At that point, doesn't your oil basically just spin with the journal? And if that happens you lose hydraulic properties of the oil film that enable it hold the journal off the bearing.

When Dice first talked about doing his bearings, I did the math on just how much less power it was taking to turn the hubs, if the MPG gains claimed were from the MB bearings. I'd have to go look up the numbers, but it was an unrealistically large percentage of the frictional losses of a truck going down the road.

And I told him then, if this is so great, MB should set up two identical hubs at MATS, one treated, one not. Spin them up and the difference in rolling resistance would be obvious to all in the spin down times.
Anyone see MB set up this kind of display, yet? </sarc>

EDIT: Ah , Red! Great minds think alike. You just typed faster! LOL

 

When it comes to other people's products, KR can lay out the whole process of testing in detail.
when it comes to his products, the only testing he knows is that of The people he class as dumb and stupid.

 

A thought on Microblue-ing main bearings: poor crankshaft machining tolerances, slightly too tight bearing clearances and/or crankshaft runout would cause the coating to wear out prematurely and excessively. Again, that comes back to PP and quality control. Slightly out of spec tolerances that would be insignificant over the long term in a generic rebuild could theoretically be catastrophic in this case.

My thought is that if I were to rebuild an engine using the Microblue process on all bearings, I would take the extra time and trouble to hand select bearings and match them to the individual crank throws in order to minimize tolerance stacking.

EDIT: to be perfectly clear, the significant benefit to the Microblue and other related processes in internal combustion engines is in the elimination of wear caused during engine startup or during prolonged idle periods. In the instance of internal combustion engines, similar benefits can be achieved through the use of an oil pre-pressurization or pre-oiler system. In a properly assembled engine, the Microblue process would have little to no effect on internal friction during normal operation.

 

Ah, here we go! 3 1/2 years ago, and still no test rig on the MicroBlue page showing how effective their treatment is!

 

He's live...

 

EXACTLY! For the extra money they spent, you'd hope that motor would have been properly blueprinted; cams, rods, mains, and rings!

 

I also seriously question the wisdom of using the Microblue process on wheel bearings, or any other roller bearing after the bearing itself has been assembled during initial manufacture. Although there SHOULD still be a measurable reduction in friction, the process itself can introduce surface imperfections into the bearing, and therefore the possibility of stress risers than can and often do lead to cracks in the bearing race that will eventually cause catastrophic bearing failure.

In other words, if you were to use this process on roller bearings, the preferred method would be to treat the ball bearings, and treat the inner and outer bearing races BEFORE assembly. However, doing it this way would probably increase the cost of the Microblue treated wheel bearings to an unacceptable level.