Deepfire Titanium Piston (full)

The Deepfire Titanium Piston clearly showed the least wear out of all 3 candidates. This may be due in large part to the hardness of its teeth, scoring an 85.1 on the Barcol hardness tester verses 77.5 and 75.0 for the Systema and ICS pistons respectively. Apart from some loss of the TiN coating on the first piston tooth, there is almost no perceptible edge deformation or wear. The remainder of the teeth also appear to be in remarkable condition. While this may seem like a great test result, it is critical to note that the harder the piston teeth are, the more wear will result on the sector gear. This is a simple fact of physics; the relative rate of wear between two surfaces is proportional to the relative hardnesses of the surfaces in contact. As will be published in our forthcoming Mega-Gearset Review, Systema gears typically yield a measurement of ~80-85 on the Barcol hardness scale. While the use of a TiN coating should help to attenuate sector gear wear, it is difficult to quantify exactly how much the coating helps.