Examining a metal under a microscope will lead you to notice the peaks and valleys in it - products of manufacturing and the tooling process. Elementary science tells you that gears that interact with each other (example, metal to metal) will create fiction, and ultimately heat. When you apply this idea to race car application, of course you like to reduce friction and heat as much as possible so you can efficiently use your horsepower and so that your car parts will “live” longer.

ISF is considered as the Super Bowl of metal finishing. On engineered metal-to-metal contact surfaces such as roller bearings and some gears, grinding (the conventional concluding metal finishing operation) is performed. It results in a surface with a unidirectional pattern that corresponds to the direction of the final grinding operation. Grinding with successively finer grinding wheels is costly, repetitious and ineffective. The results of such a process is merely a surface that has closer-spaced rows and shorter height asperities.

The fields of aerospace, automotive, medicine, military, motor sports and power generation have extensively used this process. So, should this process alter the size of your part or hurt it in any way? The “cutting” process takes a minimal amount of material from your part, but leaves you with a part that’s “isotropic”, or uniform in all directions.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved the use of this metal finishing process - this may explain why such is used in numerous industries and in several military applications. How does it operate?

The ISF Process is a chemical and physical process that flattens the peaks by cutting and taking a very, very minute (3/10000 of an inch) amount of material from your part. This process should be differentiated from grinding or buffing which “folds over” the peaks and merely makes a worse finish.In ISF process, on the other hand, you are left with a flat consistent piece of metal because the peaks are totally cut down.

Ideally, we do parts like transmission gears and ring and pinion gears to minimize drag and more efficiently utilize the horsepower you already have. It’s a two-phase metal finishing process that gives a “burnish” finish - one that comes out looking shiny, as if chromed.