Funny how after 10 years with proper coolant, I have all my plating on my EK 1080 block.
It is real simple. Don't etch it with vinegar. Don't flush it first day for no reason. Don't use distilled water. Assemble it, use proper coolant, change the coolant every 1 or 2 years per manufacturer's recommendations, and never have 'bad plating' ever again.
See how 50% of poll respondents are ignorant?
Let's play devil's advocate and say some blocks are better than others because they have thicker plating or more complete plating. Fine. I'm sure it's true. But does that mean your not ignorant for ignoring science? No. If you ignore science, you will pay the toll. How much you will pay the toll depends on all the other factors.
You...need to check your anger and ignorance.
Let me ask you, how many different ways can you plate? I'll give you a second.
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Let's cover steel. Steel+zinc = galvanized steel. Hot dipped, cold rolled, hot rolled, and electroplating are entirely different ways that create mainstream options. There absolutely are better and worse plating versions...so let me give you the insider knowledge that you don't have.
Electroplating is great. If you clean the surface badly, leave behind carbon deposits, and then electroplate it gives not one single f***. It'll encapsulate that carbon on the surface and lay down a bunch of zinc. The problem is that if you then try to form that steel you can potentially get wiping. Yes, instead of shearing or bending the zinc wipes over the surface of the carbon. It can form rifts, pocks, or if you are shearing and stretching it'll form fine wisps. Hint, if you then allow these wisps to accumulate in say a filter, which is one use of expanded metal, suddenly zinc strands get sucked down into your engine. That can't be good for it.
Hot dipped is pretty awesome. If it's hot enough the bond is slightly chemical and mechanical. IE, iron and zinc atoms in the outside layers do a bit of swapping, and you get an excellent bond. Very energy intensive, not great on the thickness consistency without rolling, and dangerous to be around. That said, it's bonded unless it was too cold...and if it fails it'll usually fail immediately.
Cold rolled is a mediocre bond, usually has some sort of cleaning and bonding flux, and prestresses the material. Great for strength, bad for formability, and it tends to be cheap. It will flake, it will disbond without critical failure, but it's cheap.
Hot rolled is cold rolled, with less grain structure changes. Not hot enough to be liquid, but the flux generally bakes off and this will provide you a dead on overall thickness. A lot of the material on the market is this, because it's generally very formable and cheaper, if not the cheapest. This is what you buy if formability matters, price is an object, but you want something at the end which will likely be meant to last.
What I haven't touched on is galvannealed (largely named for the annealing to get that grain structure unstressed), galvalum, or vacuum deposition (when cost is no object, and precision has to be king).
With all of the above said, you also have to consider the process. Let's say you're English...and an idiot. You might have worked for British Leyland, where because they hooked up the electricity backwards their galvanization process (electroplating) actually stripped the iron in their steel and formed a layer of rust that they painted over...causing the cars to rust. You could also set the voltage of your electroplating process to the moon. That'll make it plate faster, right? It couldn't possibly form new oxides inside the zinc structure, turning it from a coating of protection into a brittle surface skin that looked like swiss cheese. Most interestingly, you could plate on too low of a voltage. Yes there's some plating going on, but a zinc layer thin enough to be scraped away during regular friction events (IE usage) might as well not be there.
In short, a quick bath of vinegar, or acetic acid at insanely low concentrations, is about a damaging as the carbonic acid that the dissolution of carbon dioxide into water forms in atmospheric concentrations. Saying that would somehow matter is like claiming that a common frog on a log would have stopped the Titanic dead in the water...never mind the fact it was designed at least partially to endure impacts by icebergs. An iceberg being an order of magnitude more damaging than a log or a frog. This is why anyone with any understanding looks at the stuff that is on display with the OP's video, and laughs. He's claiming that distilled water is a problem...then showing us something that is caused not by the water, so much as what the water being an aqueous solution allows. Blame the gas company, they allowed me to fill my car with gasoline, then drive it whilst intoxicated into a building. Either that, or blame the distillery, because if I wasn't drunk I wouldn't have crashed. Never mind the actual cause of this...because they'll gladly sell you on a lawsuit to blame the refinery or distillery.
I also disconnected the light.
accidental sip)
