Summary

What do you think about modifying stock pistons with ceramic coatings and adding gas ports? I would not consider gas porting a factory piston. So most, the majority if not almost all factory pistons are cast. That's not necessarily always a problem. Cast pistons have a couple of downsides.

00:00 - What do you think about modifying stock pistons with ceramic coatings and adding gas ports? I would not consider gas porting a factory piston.
00:10 So most, the majority if not almost all factory pistons are cast.
00:16 That's not necessarily always a problem.
00:20 Cast pistons have a couple of downsides.
00:22 They are a lot more brittle than a forging and that affects their ultimate strength but from a manufacturing perspective, they're very very quick and cheap to produce which is why OEs use casting.
00:36 Now late model cast pistons often though are very strong.
00:40 We've got a set of factory cast pistons in one of these FA20s that is producing double the factory horsepower with a turbo kit added and we've had no problems with the pistons.
00:50 So why I wouldn't consider gas porting, and for those who aren't aware of what gas porting is, it's where essentially small holes are drilled either down through the crown which is called vertical gas porting, straight in behind the top ring, or alternatively lateral gas ports are down through the top of the top ring groove to get the combustion pressure in behind that top ring and that pushes the ring out against the cylinder wall, helping it seal.
01:17 So no I wouldn't do that, doing it is going to be a very very fussy job as well, it requires a lot of precision, doing lateral gas ports would need to be done before the top ring groove was machined so that's literally going to be impossible.
01:30 But yeah I would expect that the gains there, or potential improvement would be overuled by the reduction in strength with that cast piston.
01:39 In terms of ceramic coating, yeah probably possible.
01:44 If you're getting to a point where you're considering disassembling the engine and doing an operation like that, honestly it's probably about the point that you should be considering a set of forged pistons or aftermarket pistons anyway in my opinion.
01:57 It's going to be very engine dependent and it really just does come down to how much more power you're planning to add to the engine and whether or not you are still within the safe realms of what the factory pistons can support.
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