Shot peening
the best post production way to strengthen
metal. You can not get the increases in strength or
durability that shot peening brings from any other
process. The most demanding applications, where failure is
not an option, use shot peeing to increase the service
life of the component. Be it aircraft aircraft landing
gear, the compressor/turbine blades in a jet engine or the
connecting rods that are inside your engine, they are all
shot peened. Why? Because if you need to make it stronger
but can't add more weight or make a material change to the
part then shot peening is the answer.
Shot
peening is a cold metal working post process which is done
to the gears to make them tougher and last longer. The
gears are stacked onto a mandrel and loaded into our shot peening machine that uses 40HP worth of
compressed air to hurl the highest quality of steel shot available at the
gear. As the shot strikes the gear it
peens the surface, leaving
very small indentations or dimples. Overlapping dimples develop
an even layer of metal in residual compressive stress.
This compressive stress is a good thing for it is well
known fact that cracks will not initiate or propagate in a
compressively stressed zone, such as the root radius of
the gear teeth, where nearly all gear teeth failures
start. Rule of thumb: shot peened gears generally
act like they are 20-25% larger in cross section. Try to
get that kind of improvement in strength without having to change
the material that the gear was made from.
Our
Vaccu-Blast shot peener is not
to be confused with an ordinary shot blaster at an engine
shop. This
piece of
equipment is designed and built for the job of shot peening gears. It is
calibrated to provide the correct level of intensity, shot
pattern and coverage of the work piece. Our machine is
semi-automatic allowing precise control over all
parameters for perfectly shot peened gears every time.
There
are many parts inside the transmission that can be
strengthened from shot peening:
