]Kirkham Motorsports usually needs about 30 hours of computer-controlled machining to turn a 383-lb. aluminum billet into a 64-lb. engine block for its self-designed 427. Luckily for manufacturing geeks, they’ve shortened the process to seven minutes for this video.
While it looks like a button-pressing gig once in the machine, the programming for the CNC took 50 hours, on top of an additional 30 hours designing the block itself. And yes, the 319 lbs. of aluminum turned into metal shavings will be sent back to the foundry for recycling.
There was a CNC machine manufacturer who was doing this at the Chicago Trade show last year; they had a machine running blocks constantly the entire show. I forgot who the machine mfg was, but I remember asking one of my machinest buddies, and he said they were pretty much THE top CNC machines in the world.
They designed it in 30 hours and programmed the machining in 50 hours? 80 hours for that? Fucking hell engineers around here can’t decide how to scratch their asses in 80 hours.
It’s called an engineer/programmer who can do both the design and programming, work well as a team, and who has decision authority and doesn’t have a manager (or management in general) who has their nose in everything.
Its not like this is a custom engine… many examples/drawings already exist and it has to accept all gm 427 parts that are in the same boat… doesnt seem like it would take all that long if you were already familiar with modeling blocks
It takes 2 weeks (as mentioned earlier) to even get pen to paper, let alone a finished product regardless of how much existing product is available. That is the impressive part. I guess you could read it from the standpoint that it took 2 weeks of actual work to complete the project, but we worked on the project for 2 years bullshitting before the block was done.
