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Gas carburizing is a surface hardening method that is used for automobile steel parts such as gears. The conventional gas carburizing(at 1223K) takes longer time. Shortening the carburizing time will contribute greatly to the energy saving and CO2 reduction of parts production. The new carburizing process at higher temperature,1273K, and vacuum is made without adding reheating and quenching process. That process can shorten treatment time to one-fourth of conventional process. The new alloy steel for high-temperature vacuum carburizing is developed in order to prevent the grain coarsening. This paper describes the outline of this alloy steel.

We have developed a new torsional damper spring which lowers the torsional rigidity of the clutch disc while retaining its conventional size. The following two items have been adopted in the newly developed spring: 1) A new steel wire which suppresses any core-softening of the element wire through nitriding. 2) A dual-stage shot peening method which uses harder steel shots (rather than conventional shots) in order to obtain an optimal residual stress profile. As a result of evaluating the fatigue characteristics of this spring, it was discovered that its fatigue strength is approximately 35% higher than that of the conventional spring. A clutch disc using this spring was able to absorb rattling noises which conventional clutch discs could not.