"Our Blowers Suck It Old School" ______Made in the U.S.A._____ Since it's a Roots n all Put me down for a few XL's, may help fund the effort once you get some going, ya never know I have a great big hole in my 'glass hood now that I'm not runnin my big carb setup anymore...need a blower to plug the hole Goal is to do something like the Hurst Hairy Olds,etc. Lookin forward to more updates... -QQ
That, sir, is bad ass. Not to hijack Garen's thread any worse, but what became of it? Looks like its on a Pontiac?
Looks like its been awhile since we posted. CNC mill issue's have stopped our progress on the super charger case. We have to keep our regular production going and work on the super charger project when we can. Our Mazak H500 all of a sudden decided it would start rotating 90 degree's on each pallet it loaded wither we wanted it to or not. Dzuari is also busy building two machining fixtures for good customers and we just have not had any time. It looks like we will have some time late this month. Not sure on the indexing thing but we have a service man scheduled to come in and try to figure our what happened.
Day 403 I see my photos from earlier post have screwed up, that will be fun to fix. What's been going on So, been extremely busy still. I've been working on a new job for one of our old customers for about a month or two also while helping out with our new powder coat line. We've been seeing a steady increase in work come back all year and i'm proud/astonished to say that we have had our best year ever in the past 65 years of being in business. Upcoming Videos, I get a lot of people messaging me asking how to get stuff made so instead of replying the same thing to a bunch of people i figured i'd just make videos over the various processes, ill also be doing some more videos over design, 3D printing, pattern/mold making and CNC work. I'm also getting a price together on building my own CNC for light pattern work. __________________________________________________________________ Blower Just giving you guys an update. Machine is finally free and the second fixture is on the machine. This is our 4th axis horizontal, This Op will cut the contour around the outside of the blower to fit any plate we like. However, I'm heading out today to go down to the PRI show for the rest of the week and vacation after that so i wont be back till the 9th to begin programming and cutting. I'm going to try and get press credentials to do some videoing down at the show. ________________________________________________________________ Powder Coat System In other news our powder coat system has been up and running for the past month or so, been real busy with that along with new work coming into our shop. Here is some photos. I'll have a video up hopefully sometime next month over the process and I'm going to get some more videos up over our foundry and CNC shop. ______________________________________________________________ Our History I'll finish up with a throw back into my Family and its businesses history if anyone is interested. We ran across some old family photos of when my grandfather started Phillips Patterns back in 1947. The building on the right is the chicken coop where it all started 65 years ago. My grandfather was working at a local pattern shop here in Muncie making $0.90 an hour, the foreman promised him a nickle raise in 60 days, when the 60 days came he didn't give it so my grandfather quit and started his own business making wood patterns by hand out of his chicken coop. _________________________________________________________________ This photo is sometime in the late 50's early 60's. We added our greensand line in 57-58 which consisted of a guy shoveling sand from the floor into a flask that sat on the squeezer(just like the squeezer you may have saw in Making a 671 Part 1 video). _________________________________________________________________ In the early 70's my father began work as a apprentice pattern maker, he's on the left. __________________________________________________________________ This is my Uncle, Larry Roetken, working on a riser for a pattern. He now owns his own tool shop. His shop was the one you saw in the first part of "Making a 671" video. __________________________________________________________________ Our Shop sometime in the late 80's early 90's. __________________________________________________________________ Our current main facility, This photo was taken in 2000, our machine shop, permanent mold, shell core and cleaning room are all housed here, our die cast and powder coat is just off to the right but cut out of the photo. We still own the shop in the previous photo which is our greensand foundry, it still sits on the same spot the chicken coop use to stand on.
Kinda funny, I got the notification that there was an update on this thread this morning, but hadn't had time to come look. then this afternoon I am sitting at my desk at work and looking up some information on casting and accidentally ran across your youtube channel Not sure if you posted a link somewhere int he last 14 pages, but if not, you're holding out on his here at the HAMB. you have a heck of a lot of good stuff in there! In case you others haven't been there: https://www.youtube.com/user/dzuari
I've posted the videos a few times on this thread. I've got some other threads with videos also. I'll be making some more once I'm back home from PRI.
Day 472 I've had some more time to work on the blower, currently i am working with our CAM software provider to get our post-processor(CNC language converter) right so that our machine will read the correct code and not crash. The post-processor is about 90% correct, once its done though i'll be able to cut any kind of contour for any kind of plate we design on the case. This photo is was taken about 5 minutes before i had to shut it down due to a problem with the G-code causing the machine to try and crash into the steel fixture below the case. this is that 10% im talking about that needs to be fixed . This operation with cut the blower plate contours, from here it will be shot blasted once more, then put back onto our vertical mills to have a finishing pass the top and bottom sides of the case. then back onto this machine to drill/tap/face and bore the plate faces. While the casting is starting to look like a finished blower this is still only 60-70% complete through the machining phase.
Hi Garen I'm working on a Home Made Potvin style Blower setup and bought a blower end bearing cover on E-bay a couple of months ago... (Really Nice and for a good price!) After I received it I asked the guy what DPI stood for? He said "that's the name of the foundry that makes these"....Never could find it on-line... ...SO NOW I KNOW! Blower: How are you guys going to make the screws? NICE DUSTER!!!
Thanks for the business even though you didn't know lol. The rear plate has been our best seller, along with the case im also working on transferring the plates to our high speed mills to increase production time. For the rotors we are testing out a new casting method, if it works we should hopefully be able to cast hollow high helix rotors, but for now we are working with a friend that owns his on machine shop that will be cutting them out of billet.
Starting To Look like a Blower We've hired on a new machinist to help out with fixturing, Its helped out a ton and given me more time to work on the blower. Just finished up the 3D contouring Op that cuts the ends to match the plates. After this its going into a shot blast machine, then back onto the CNC's for another 2 Ops(finish facing, bore roughing/finishing, drilling and tapping). We've been really busy lately, went from 22 employees to 33 in the past 2-3 months and I've got a greensand pattern and shell corebox to cut and 2 CNC fixtures to cut. Our powder coat is running good, a lot of people sending in quotes for work, Next week im going down to St. Loius for Casting Exo 2013 and maybe New York on the 22-23 for the 3D Printing Conference and Expo, I'll be posting pics on our Facebook and hopefully I can get some footage and upload it. https://www.facebook.com/DiamondPRacing I also plan on getting videos up again, I finally have enough money to get a 3D printer and hopefully some videos out of a method I've been tinkering with that lets me turn plastic printed parts into metal. Should be awesome for custom cylinder heads and 1 off parts that i know a lot of you have asked me about.
Keep up the good work. You will get there. Keep the paying customer jobs meeting deadlines and work on this when you have extra time.
We have 2 cases ready for the for the machining of the ends locating the front & rear plates. Dowel pin location is critical and it will be interesting to see the tolerance we can hold. We then have a boring bar demonstration from a tool supplier to machine the bores and we will have a completed case. We are going to machine both to the large bore rotors. We have a couple of raw castings left over just in case, lol. In a couple weeks we are traveling to a shop to see a new process that hopefully will let us cast the rotors in A356.2 with a T6 heat treat with minimum machine finish and nearly to net shape. I have been in this business for 38 years and the new technology of 3D printing is just amazing. Sorry for the lack of posts on our progress but we are damn busy and getting more new work every week. After we get the 671 done and on the market our 871 will get there much quicker I hope. Thank you all for the interest you have shown in our company and products.
I have been watching this thread and have been very impressed by the level of the blowers concept-tooling-machining, no doubht a very quality piece. My question to you is- Why do you feel there is a need for another blower company out there?
We like cars and racing.The blower project started when I was sitting at work in late 2008 with 3 days of production left and then we would close the doors until some work came in. I wanted a product we could sell that would add casting and machining work to our foundry & machine shop. So I said, ''Lets build a blower''! I never really thought about other blower companies, competition or market studies, etc. I have had a lot of people tell me its the wrong way to go but I've heard that many times before. We want to build a great product that looks great and performs great. It is not about competing with other blower companies it's about our product and making it as good as we can. Its about taking care of our workers and providing them a stable job with a future for improvement. When a employee goes to a car show and they see one of our blowers they can say, "I helped build that and be proud of it''. I just bought a 72 Nova with a 502 and a Weiand 871 for a test car. The real reason when you get though all the rest of this is dropping the hammer on 1,000hp with a blower we built. I recently gave parking lot rides for the employee's in the Nova and got several, ''Holy shit moments'', lol. For us it's about the product, castings and our reputation as a quality shop. I spend a whole lot of time looking at our blower project, design's, customers parts and very little time looking at the money. I got a controller for that and he reins me in from time to time but I eventually wear him down, lol. Next up Ferro arm 3D scanner & cmm combo and a 1.5% resin sand 3D mold printer! Yep and to all that do not know what that is. It's castings without tooling! If you can draw it on cad (Garen not me) you can make it. Sorry for the long winded reply but I could go on forever! I really love this business, where our company is headed and talking about the new technology on the horizon.
And that is great, the abilitity to do everthing in house, all except the digging for the ore itself. And if the company is doing well enough to sponser this project , even better.My comments are based on my business model that one does not need a burger stand on every corner. Go forth and build cause I am getting hungry
I love the passion. I think a big seller will be the ability to run 8/71 rotors in a 6/71 case, since 6/71 manifolds are easiest to find. (Is that still on the table?) What is the prospective blower product line look like at this point?
Great work. Thanks for keeping it in the US and employing our own. Amazing tech and processes. Jim Ford (55willys)
Yes we are lucky we can do this and still maintain production. If we started this idea without the financial support it would have been out of business a couple month after we started. I'm pretty sure were in the hole to ourselves for a bunch including all the time & tooling. We will get the food out of the oven for you asap, lol, just as soon as I'm convinced its prepared perfectly. Thanks for your support dreracecar.
We are still looking at combo's on rotors and cases. One idea I was looking at is adding a 1'' spacer to the 671 case and making a 2 pcs 871 case using the 671 main casting. As far as manifolds go we will concentrate on SBC & BBC first. We are almost ready to put our drive kit for SBC out there. Still a few bugs to work out. The complete 671 on the market depends on the rotor's. We doing the end work on the case this week and then will get a boring bar demo to see which way we go for the bores. Believe it or not our tool guys say we might want to drill the rough bore (Big ass drill) then finish with the boring bar.
Thanks Willy. Yep, we have amazing people working for us and I would put them against anybody in the world for skill & heart. We pay them well and expect 7.5 out of 8 hours a day and they give it every day.
Nice Work. As a tool and die maker it is nice to see something being built in America! The Automotive company I work for is sending everything to Mexico and China. I am in the process of throwing together a gm 6-71 When you get the drive kit together, I will be ordering thanks. Keep up the hard work!!
As long as your blowers fit standard 6/71 manifolds then people will be happy - there are a lot of old ones for old motors hanging around.
The Jalopy Journal
