Anyone have any experience/opinions with RB Aluminum Side Housings?
 

RACING BEAT products have always been hi-end pieces, and they have more experience with rotary mazda than 99% of the entire forum. of course time will tell on these end plates, who is going to make the titanium rotors 5.5 lbs each? RON

They would be cool, but GOOD LORD you'd be dropping some cash into a motor with those things. I've never heard of anyone ponying up for a motor with those guys.

Dale

Is 25-30 lbs in the engine a lot to loose?

Is there really any other benefit?

Better than gutting your interior or removing A/C or P/S

I wonder how these housing effect the heat transfer of the engine. I know preignition is a problem with these cars when you run high boost. Would this make it better or worse of a problem?

It would be interesting to find out.

Aluminum transfers heat much better than cast iron so it seems more heat would be transferred to the engine via the coolant and oil.

Since AL transfers heat better I wonder if the hot spots would decrease?

The other thing to consider would be the carbide coating that Racing Beat uses as opposed to Mazda's nitride coating. They've found it to be more durable, but made no mention of its effect on heat transfer. With luck, Racing Beat's coating will transfer heat better as well.

-s-

"Carbide flame coating" ... hmm... sounds an awful lot like Nikasil. That's a good thing.

Nikasil is silicon carbide in a nickel substrate. It's been used for decades to plate cylinders, consistently resulting in a very low friction and high life wear surface, especially compared to cast iron. As for conductivity, Nikasil-plated aluminum performs FAR better than cast iron. That's why they're so common in aircooled engines. 911 engines used them for decades and now, even after they're watercooled, they still use Nikasil plating.

To give you an idea of the hardness of Nikasil, I should note that after plating, honing a cylinder requires diamond tooling!

Take care,
Shad

Iron and aluminum expand at different rates when heated so having an all aluminum motor may be a good thing from that perspective.