[JSchmitz]

Originally Posted by darbikrash

Thanks to all for the patience in hanging in with this project. I have been involved since the beginning, getting the scan done, getting a 3D printed model, and helping out with some of the computer modeling work. I have owned a company that does mechanical engineering and product development for more than 30 years, so this project is a good fit for us.

Tom was gracious enough to come along with me today to the foundry to facilitate the hand off. The foundry is enthusiastic about this project, and so am I. Contracts were signed, purchase orders given and the deposit was made so the production is now officially started.

The casting tooling is now underway, which will take around 8 weeks. During that time we will develop the necessary fixtures to accomplish the machining of the finished castings. I plan to do all the machining work in house on our 5 axis mill.

While this is not really a 5 axis job, using this machine will mean the part can be machined on 5 sides in a single setup, and insures that the tolerances and feature relationships are of high precision.

As a side project, we are also machining a late model style manifold from a solid billet. Here are a few pics, the top is done but the base is still on the machine as it is a big project. The chunk of raw aluminum weighs 145 lbs, and the toolpaths contain over 240,000 lines of code, all which had to be programmed. Here are a few shots of the plenum area that was roughed out of the billet.


I’ll post updates on the casting tooling periodically as things progress, and we should have some really nice intakes shortly. After visiting the foundry, I am confident that they can turn out high quality castings- Tom did a great job finding these folks and getting the project this far.

Very impressive! So glad to hear that this is going forward!