Shoptalkforums.com

Actually....just doing some baseline research on cryo....will tell you that it works. Its the staple of the high end machine tool and drill bit industry. There has been tons writtten about it. Even Popular mechanics and popular science have done numerous articles on it over the past decade.

Its not longer a question of wether it works, its a question of wether you have (as it appears Jake has found)....the correct application of it to your tooling or part.

There are companies...whose sole job...is cryo-ing tooling. Ray

I can tell you from first hand experience that cryo'ing an aluminum or iron casting greatly changes the material properties. We learned this way back with the 'biral babies' (remember those?). We had a customer who decided they wanted them shorter after they had been cryoed. Needless to say, the cast liners ate all our tooling and destroyed the entire set. From then on, it was machine first, then cryo later. We've even noticed that our extruded material used for the Nickies machines differently (but not in a good way- it tends to not to want to form chips). From what I've learned through contacting companies who use the process, a forged or extruded material doesn't benefit from increased strength or thermal conductivity like a casting does after the cryo process, but that the material tends to have a better fatigue life. I like to have turbo cylinders cryo'ed just for this reason.

Charles Navarro
LN Engineering
http://www.LNengineering.com
Aircooled Precision Performance