wpc treatment instead of nitriding irons?
 

Just curious if you can substitute wpc treatment for nitriding irons.
I have a 13bt rear iron with the thicker casting around the dowel and I don't know if it has been lapped or is beyond the nitriding layer. Is there a minimum thickness I can measure, instead of just measuring the scratches?

I'm hopefully finding out about WPC vs Nitride some day.

Current motor has-
New S5 rear plate
Used S5 center plate with ~.0005 step wear on one side, ~.00025 other
Used S5 front housing, ~.0025 lapped off and WPC coated.

Basically, I was too lazy to buy a new front plate/middle plate and do all the porting and oil mods over.

I have run plates ground/lapped through the nitride before and they wear pretty fast, if the WPC provides any more wear resistance its worth the $80 to me.

I looked into re-nitriding briefly and it looks complicated. It seems no one is using Mazda's 3 zone differential nitriding process and there is probably a good reason for going through that process.

Regarding how far you can lap the plates before the coolant grooves are too shallow-

My experience is you won't get there on your 1st, 2nd or 3rd lap- but obviously you don't want to go down the road of running/constantly lapping un-nitrided plates if you can avoid it.

Well, WPC does not make the surface harder, it's not a coating or something like that, it just changes the surface (Kindoff like shot peening), so that it retains oil better. I haven't done a whole lot of research, but I don't think it will make the surface much more wear resistant, maybe a little because of the better lubrication, but once the texture wears away (Which I guess it will do pretty fast) it's just an untreated non-nitrated plate which wears.

Maybe flame-spraying is an option, it adds material so you can keep the stock plate thickness. Might be tricky to keep the flamespraying out of the waterseal grooves though. Maybe nikasil plating, or hardchroming, or titanium nitrade coating.

The WPC treatment I had done most certainly left a surface deposit layer.

It appeared to me they blasted the housing at very high speed with fine Teflon particles.

This would change the surface texture as you state but also ingrain lubricious teflon into the surface.

Much as Mazda used to dry run new motors with Teflon powder on the rotor housing surface to push the Teflon into the porous chrome plating. This process was supplanted with a graphite process.

Like I said, I will try anything that helps mitigate wear on un-nitrided housings even slightly. I used to Parkerize (convert the surface to Iron Phosphate) the naked sidehousings and even that helped wear a very minor amount.

Maybe flame-spraying is an option, it adds material so you can keep the stock plate thickness. Might be tricky to keep the flamespraying out of the waterseal grooves though. Maybe nikasil plating, or hardchroming, or titanium nitrade coating.

Thats $$$$ in the US.

Maybe we can arrange a group buy where we ship our side housings to a 3rd world nation to be flame sprayed (bad joke, but its an old, messy, dangerous process).

Hopefully Electric Discharge Deposition gets cheaper as it becomes more common.