Plateau Honing for common rail injectors

In our Technical series spawned from the Ask Matt B Live show co-hosted with 4WD Presenter, Matt B discussed the technology that goes into making the Baileys Blueprinted DLC control piston. One of the key developments required was the methodology of Plateau honing in order to offset the hardness of the DLC coating.

Rough surface finishes provide excellent lubrication as it provides ‘valleys’ for the oil / diesel to sit in, however provides low surface area to distribute the wear and increased friction. Alternatively, a very smooth finish will provide low friction and excellent wear properties, but no lubricity and therefore causes more issues than it solves.

As a result, honing and surface finish quality is always a fine balancing act. Until Now!

Plateau honing allows us to combine the best of both worlds – its just incredibly hard to actually achieve! basically we rough out leaving our large peaks and troughs, then we do a second cut with an ultra fine cutting stone which gives us a VERY FINE surface finish – BUT – we only take off the peaks leaving the troughs there for lubrication!

Pretty neat solution hey?

More information can be seen on our Blog Post here regarding the DLC finish, what it is and what it does. 

BDG always wanted to target the use of DLC coatings within their injector, however technically we were unable to achieve this without a great deal of Research and Development.

One key breakthrough that made it possible was the methodology that allowed the use of Plateau honing. There is actually lots and lots of information on the internet about plateau honing, however it all involves the use flexible filaments which will gentle rub the top off the peaks. However its somewhat ‘uncontrolled’ and certainly not ok for tight tolerances used in CRI.

If you missed it, check the Blog post were we try to fit a control piston just 0.001mm larger. 

Therefore, we need to be able to achieve the results of plateau honing with the finish quality of honing with highly accurate stones. Our main technical challenge was actually being able to complete a 2 stage honing process (rough out and final plateau) across hundreds of injector bodies throughout a production run.

This is blog post were we talk about the equipment we use

So here you can see a small amount of information of one part of our very detailed work process… This level of technology and detailed engineering is in every Baileys Blueprinted Injector we build.

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