CNC Machining
Reverse-Engineering a Porsche 944 Throttle Body - part one
The stock bore on a Porsche 944 Throttle Body is roughly 55mm, which is fine for stock power (250HP on the Turbo S), but when it comes to building more power, we have no choice but to flow more air. Interesting enough, the opening of the stock intake manifold plenum is much closer to 65mm (obviously this is a 10mm difference). Now that might not sound like much... but 55mm vs 65mm is actually a percent difference of nearly 17%, which we think is a significant enough amount of potential airflow to look for an opportunity in redesign. Our plan is...
Holy Moly! – Finding the centers of CNC Lathe gang tooling
When designing the CNC Lathe toolpaths for the Porsche AN Fuel Filter fitting, we decided to employ gang tooling alongside turret tooling to increase the speed and precision of the 500 part batch. With this approach came a new challenge: how do we perfectly orient the center points of the gang tools along the X-axis of the lathe? With a gang setup, each tool has its own unique center relative to the lathe chuck, and each and every one of those centers need to be found and programmed into the lathe. Ideally, a multi-position gang block, used for mounting multiple tools will...