INNOVATOR
SPOTLIGHT
relationships and trust with his customers. The
concierge-style service allows Giebas and Gibtec
to provide a high-end, exclusive feel without the
correlating price tag.
All of Gibtec’s pistons and components are
manufactured in-house with a critical eye over-
seeing each and every process. Unlike many
other manufacturers, Gibtec’s performance
pistons are all machined from either 2618
aluminum or 4032 aluminum, with the latter
being used more sparingly and for street-only
applications. The benefit for the customer is
a quicker turn-around time, as Gibtec doesn’t
have to stock hundreds of forgings and can
quickly machine a block of billet aluminum
into whatever is needed on the fly. “We just
keep solid pieces on hand and make whatever
we need. We also sell wrist pins and rings, and
do our own piston coatings in-house, which
helps because then you don’t have to send it
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out and wait on a second party,” Giebas adds.
“People get it into their heads that billet pistons
are so expensive, but they’re really not. We figured
out a way to make them efficiently,” continues
Giebas, who strongly believes in the advantages of
a billet aluminum piston over a traditional forged
piston. “With a forging, you’re stuck working with
the dimensions of that original forging. With
billet, we can do anything you want and the end
result is up to the imagination. It lets us be more
versatile with what we’re doing.”
Additionally, a set of billet aluminum pistons
from Gibtec are also significantly closer in weight
to one another than forged pistons typically are.
“We can get weights within a half a gram of each
other, while forgings are usually two or three
grams apart,” Giebas noted of the discrepancies
between the two materials. “Our customers don’t
have to worry about weights or balancing their
pistons when they get them.”
Issue 134