Es war sehr beeindruckend.
Easily one of the most interesting parts of the Rotax factory tour was the plasma coating. We’ll admit that process is something we knew very little about although Ski-Doo has been touting the benefits of plasma coated cylinders for a while now.
Here’s a little of what we learned:
- Rotax installed its plasma coating machine four years ago.
- The temperature in the plasma coating process hits a toasty 15,000 degrees C (if you can believe the Internet that converts into 27,032 degrees F).
- There are 65 process steps for each part being plasma coated. For includes, flow speeds, voltage, powder feed rate, time the cylinder block is in process, rpm of the plasma torch, Argonne gas concentration and the cooling temp of the water for the torch, just to name a few.
- It takes four minutes per block to plasma coat.
- Five layers of plasma coating are applied on four-stroke cylinders and six layers on two-stroke cylinders.
- Rotax is the only company in the world that offers plasma coating on two-stroke cylinders. Also, Rotax developed the process of plasma coating for two-stroke cylinders.