Roller burnishing
process used to obtain mirror finishes inside metal holes by using rollers
Roller burnishing is a surface finishing technique where hardened rollers cold work surface imperfections to reduce surface roughness. Roller burnishing differs from abrasive surface finishing techniques in that material is displaced rather than removed. The tooling typically consists of a hardened sphere or cylindrical roller. The tooling is pressed into the surface of the part while it is rotated (in some applications, the tools are rotated instead of the part). The burnishing tool rolls against the surface of the part at a constant speed, producing a very consistent finish across the part. A surface finish of less than Ra 0.1 μm is achievable with roller burnishing. A side effect is that the outer surface of the part is work hardened.
Crankshaft manufacturing
Roller burnishing is used in the production of some crankshafts. A dual roller (cylindrical) tool is moved into the thrust bearing journal of a crankshaft, while the crankshaft is spinning the tool is indexed (so each roller is perpendicular to the thrust surface while backing each other up) deforming the surfaces. So the diameters of each roller added together (compensated for elastic deformation) equals the finish dimension of the thrust bearing.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Roller burnishing” as process used to obtain mirror finishes inside metal holes by using rollers. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3094700. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roller burnishing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.