Okay, this post has no milling, no casting and isn't even about a car. However, it is a vintage vehicle from the early days of the sport of snowmobile racing (1973) and it is a bit of a hot rod in the sense that it is slightly modified. The reason for this post is the finish I put on the part I modified. I have no mill and no idea how I could cast a part, but I did build a turned intake manifold for a snowmobile racing in vintage class a few years ago. The rules (made to be broken according to Smokey Yunick) required stock engines and clutching. Small town and small scale fun only racing, so nobody was too concerned about it actually being stock if there wasn't a big performance advantage like big bores and porting. However if I had something on the outside that was obviously altered and happened to win the race some loud mouth was likely to cry "foul". I have a rear engined snowmobile that is not really rare, but unusual enough that luckily most guys are not too familiar with parts details. The problem was the carb was mounted at the rear of the engine and the rear of the chassis with no room for an elbow on the inlet of the carb and it was sucking in a lot of snow dust. In just a few miles of mostly wide open throttle the snow dust would ice up the carb inlet and fuel atomizing tube, leaning out the fuel/air mixture and causing piston failure. My solution was to cut some pieces from the long intake runners of a Ford 300 six injection manifold and TIG weld them into a curved manifold that moved the carb to a location where I could attach a piece of flexible 3" aluminum dryer duct running forward to an air scoop in the body. I didn't want my manifold to look modified, so I smoothed the weld areas with a 4.5" flappy disc and a die grinder, sand blasted the whole thing, then beat hell out of it with a welders needle scaler. Then lightly sand blasted again and to my eye it looks like it was cast that way. Nobody ever gave the part a second look, so maybe I was successful, what do you think? Anyway, my best finish so far was 4th in a field of about 35 machines, but the pistons live a long and happy life now.
When I had my shop I made a few OT parts that the owner wanted to look like old castings. After fabbing and welding the parts, I ground it to shape, had them shot peened and sandblasted with coarse sand. It all came out looking just like castings on the outside. Loved those oddball jobs.
Depends on what you're duplicating. As long as it's an old hot rod part like the PAW water tube for a blown HEMI or a early Corvette valve cover, I would think it would fit in here. An Eddie Meyer intake for a LS motor wouldn't though....
The green 4 cylinder engine I posted is a Renault engine for which no finned parts exists except for the super rare Record valve cover a $600 piece when they pop up. I'll probably make my own side cover and valve cover for that engine in the future. Reproducing rare parts means having access to those rare and sometimes very expensive parts. Also beware of copyrights. Gimpys idea is really excellent, 3d could be a possibility too. Not everybody as the ressources or skills to fabricate parts like these. Have you an idea of cost to reproduce an existing part like a valve cover? If you have to create a part for an oddball engine, I'm assuming the time spent will be much higher (since I'm computer illiterate I have no clue) thus increasing cost. Did you consider the possibility of someone sending you the CAD or whatever it is called so you can "only" mill the part? In the end it all comes down to how much it will cost.
I have a shop where we CNC mill items for R&D departments of companies that lack the facilities. That we already do. Our only limit is the physical size of the machine. I am looking to expand that to scanning parts to be reproduced. I have a few contacts that have 5, 10, 15-of-a-kind vehicles, that need parts that don't exist, and never existed in any quantity bigger than the number of vehicles made. That would require scanning an existing one, where possible.
Hey, Gimpy; Thanks for considering. I'm *always* interested in learning. There's lots of folks that can't find, much less afford, the $$$Unobtainium. Those that can - cool. Those that can't, well, something like what you're doing/proposing would really help. All it needs is a discreet marking that is hard to remove to prove part isn't original. Low-buck folks don't care, happier w/the looks n performance. & I'm *not* talking about posers. For instance, I'd love a real 427 Cobra, but would never/ever drive it on the street - if *anything* happened to it, my $$ level couldn't repair it, much less replace almost-un-replaceable. An interesting clone, maybe. Same w/old speed parts. This also somewhat covers the theft issues. WTF can afford to have that stuff stolen, but replacing a clone? Not quite as painful - mentally or $$-wise. Marcus...
I 3D modeled 3 different intake manifolds and then made the patterns to cast them. I have a CNC router and use Solidworks modeling software and import those file into BobCAD/CAM software to whittle them out. Easy peezy!
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