Is it possible to hand stone a rotor housing?
During my rebuild I find that my fwd rotor housing is scored in the area between the compression and trailing plug hole. I am in the process of hand dressing it with a stone.
I am running a new apex seal through prussian blue to find the high spots and am trying to smooth them out.
This process would be similiar to honing a reciprocating engine.

I haven't seen anything in the shop manuals which describes this procedure. Has any one out there done this?

Am I wasting my time or is this a valid repair procedure?
Also, how thick is the chrome plating? I suspect I am killing engine life doing this.

 

if you're removing any material at all, you're just reducing the life off, and probably reducing the compression of, the rotor housing...but, if ya can't get a new one, what the heck, go for it...I think it's a flame-sprayed titanium alloy coating, it's not too thick at all, once the apex seal wears into the aluminum (if it can actually do that without falling out of the rotor?), it's all over...

 

Thanks, The idea behind the stoning would be to increase the compression because it takes out high spots which would otherwise allow the compressed mixture to leak back between the housing and the apex seal. Plus the smoother housing would increase the life of the seals. The engine had bad compression before I took it out of the car. I'm thinking the scoring had something to do with it. The down side that I do see to this is the shortened engine life due to plating removal.

 

the problem is, unless it's raised material you're removing, you'd have to remove the same amount of material over the entire housing, or the apex seal's going to ride over a "valley"...new rotor housings actually have a pretty rough surface, compared to,say, a finished mirror surface...I would guesstimate that the nitrided surface is no thicker than .020 or so...

 

I would reccomend NOT to do it..,

the surface is made to be porous so it will hold oil. This may kill lubrication.

 

i would think the apex seals would wear accordingly to match the surface of the rotor housings, i think thats why you get lower compression during the break in period.

 

id pick up new housings. you can get cheap ones at http://mazdadragracing.com/indexpage.html