Calling all machinists or hobbyists who have turned a chip for there car or fun. This thread is purely for the cool factor and/or inspiration. Here are a few of mine. Attached are a few pics of a hub & center lug I made while I was part of FSAE. Notice the killer OZ Rims I did this on a Fryer MB-15 CNC Mill with an ANILAM M1400 Controller. If anyone else has made some neat stuff, post it up.

 

And some more

 

And the last of the group

 

nice Porsche inspired?

what type of car is this going on?

 

These were made for an FSAE car. Pretty much, they are scaled down F1 cars with a Honda F4i powering them.

 

Years ago, when I was a CNC machine operator, I made me a billet "Pinewood" Derby car. The local autocross club has races at the awards banquat every year & the Unlimited Class has only 2 rules. No propulsion (gravity only) & 1lb maximum weight.

I made the tires out of Delrin, the hubs out of 6061T6 and ran on roller bearings & the Camaro body out of 1 block of 6061T6. Sure was a lot of waste to machine out the inside, to get it to EXACTLY 1lb.

 

lol ok i just realized the dimension and size of the piece
nice work

 

Ive had a few things made

Main engine/blower plates. 1/4" steel



Inlet/outlet flanges for the same setup. Had them machined after I cut the first set by hand with an angle grinder... never again

Currently have the crank hub and centering rings at the machine shop for this



Its for a 10 rib blower setup on a LS1 keeping the 6 rib accessory drive separate. LS1s have cast iron balancers with no usable bolt holes so I had to reinvent the setup. The universal SBC 10 rib pulley sticks out way to far so I had to figure out a way to flip it, keep it centered and figure out a way to bolt it all together

 

Thats pretty slick Stephen. How'd you get the contours to match so well? CCM or something else?

 

Honestly? I don't remember.

That was around 2002 and my memories are pretty fuzzy past Aug 2004. Just bits & pieces now. Can you say...Severe Head Injury?

Only parts I do recall are that is the machines memory (stored programs for repeat customer jobs) had to wiped out (transferred to a back-up drive) to fit the outer contour program on the machine. A ball-nose bit was used, obviously. And, from looking at a copy of my old Resume showing what I was running there, Mazak VTC-200B or VTC-16 CNC (only 2 mills i ran there) and it took ALL DAY LONG (and then some).

The inner pocket to reduce its overall weight & the hubs were separate programs. I had the Delrin tires made by the owners son on a CNC (unknown brand or model) horizontal lathe.

I should have had him make the hubs too, becase the tires don't QUITE spin perfectly round, causing wobble & not rolling as fast as it could.

 

and how did that car place? I made a 63 split window coupe and a Shelby Daytona last year ( both out of wood)

 

Not very good. It was my first year to run & the hubs/spindles/wheels (all 1 piece) didn't turn out true and concentric, so the wheels kinda "bounced" up & down, rotating off-center.

Nothing major, but if you hold it in your hand & spin a wheel, you can see the wobble.

While mechanical propulsion is not allowed (electric or "jet"), weight redistribution is allowed. As in, an open compartment inside that allows weight to shift inside & "propel" the car forward. Like ball bearing moving inside....Seen that done & it works quite well.

My tires, while they look good for appearance, offered excessive rolling resistance, being so wide. I did make new thin tires for less resistance, but never made wheels for them to try out the next year.

 

My current DIY CNC work is to fit true Hi/Low HIDs under the flip-up headlight doors of Firebirds.

Initial CNC work has been done, just need to finish the CAD work, but I no longer have ANY CAD software, so I am having to design it on paper & pay for it to be done.

 

No college kids to borrow a student copy of SW from?

When I was on the FSAE team, they gave out tons of copies to anyone who wanted it, student or not

 

Autodesk is doing 13 month give aways of all its software. All you need is a valid student email address. I've found CAD and Inventor to be far more user friendly than SW or ProE.

 

I don't know any college students to get a copy from. I just always did stuff at work, on the work PCs, while my mill was running. If anybody knows of anyway to get a copy (not that I even remember how yo CAD draft anymore anyways), lemme know.

Or if anybody here is willing to take some specs from me & convert it into a file that can be used on their Mazak.........

 

I hear all these stories about Auto Cad and I can't realize the problems with copy write infringements that they had.
But at one time, I had a old computer that I converted to a Auto Cad only with a Window's 98 program - that does not log online that will run forever.

I can't imagine anybody paying over and over again for the same program.....

As luck would have it, someone borrowed the computer, crashed it, forgot to save the auto cad and now I don't have it anymore....

 

If you could scan me what you have, I could get you the CAD files and CAM files made up when I start working in the student shop again in two weeks. We got all big name CAD programs and I can do a CAM file for you in Mastercam. Couldn't run it for you though, I'd get fired.

 

Autodesk is run by a bunch of insane people. Its a whole ordeal to be a user on more than one computer, and the newest versions phone home to momma on a somewhat regular basis (this can be blocked, I did) to make sure the version you're using is still "valid" in their eyes. My former boss made the mistake of doing an "upgrade" from a prior version. What that does is make your earlier version completely useless, because when it phones home to mommaCAD it is told that it is no longer authorized to operate and your version 2007 is now a brick. Thats fine, I guess, if 2008 is not full of so many programming errors that it is functionally useless and you NEED to go back to 2007 to actually work on something. Sure... it only cost us a few grand instead of 6k or so, but we lost the use of the prior version. Ended up going back to 2006 for a while, until patches were issued. For the 6k a pop we were paying you'd think you would not be beta testing... or you'd be getting timely service. Hah.

The reason most of us out there using this on a regular basis are stupid enough to upgrade all the time is because you hit a point in time where everyone else is using a newer version and saving files to a format you cant read. Thats ok for one or two files and non-timely material, but when you're battling the clock and someone sends over 20+ updated files in a new format... guess what you really need to have? The newest version...

/rant off

If you can get a hold of a copy of 2000 I would advise that. Its fairly stable and bug free, doesnt want a lot of memory or resources, and doesnt phone home looking for approval to run. Its useless for 3D IMO, but if you really want to you can. I'd rather use SW or maybe Inventor that I havent used yet. They have a free trial, but it may be useless to do anything other than play with. I have 2000, 2006, 2007 (bricked), and 2008 on here. 2000 is also a lot easier to deal with as far as registration, the newer versions if you buy it used you're most likely going to be on the phone with an unfriendly person at Autodesk.

I like the derby car, thats pretty cool. I've done a few things, but one that I started and didnt finish was making slides for the power seat track on my 86 out of brass. I made one, thats all I have so far. Need 8. Lol. Cant find a picture of it, I guess I'll keep looking.

 

For my $0.02 worth:
2000 has issues with printing. Don't remember the details since it was so long ago, but we deemed it as worthless because of the hassles involved. We either go back one to R14 or forward to 2002.
IMO 2002 is better but you can't let it phone home.

 

Guess I lucked out when I forked out for the AutoCAD 2002 full version

3D works fine as you can see. Program hasnt let me down yet

Ive used every version of vanilla up to 2009 without issue or bug to speak of

 

Here are some pieces I built during FSAE. We always used Unigraphics. Our Baja team used SolidWorks.











I really wish I had taken some pictures of us post machining our front spindles on the CNC lathe.

What year and for what team was yall part of? Im VT 09.

 

I do have a lathe and table mill in my garage. However I know my limitations when it comes to machining and I have a friend do the serious stuff. Right now I am having made up a set of large diameter long tube runners for my motor. This includes modifying the factory plenum and aftermarket Accel base for higher flow. Also a lot of aluminum welding is involved.

 

Steven if you send me the files I can draw them up for you in SW no problem. email is fenton06ATgmailDOTcom

 

All I have at this point, is a hand-made version that has the be measured out & put on paper, then put into CAD. Unfortunately, I do not even have a machine quality set of calipers nor anyways to set up a good X/Y, 0/0, and start writing it down for CAD. I sold my stuff after I was no longer doing CNC work. Just kept the thread tapping stuff.

 

I'm not aware of anything like that (I'm going to look anyway) and I've been using it for 10 years on various systems and printers. I was even handling the IT end so if there were printer issues I'd know about it with the equipment I was using (Oce plotters, HP plotters, HP laser printers, HP deskjets, Canon deskjets, Epson deskjets, an old pen plotter my dad used, maybe more). More likely a printer specific thing, or the one problem I know of that isnt 2000 specific and that is printing inside wipeouts and outside viewports with the Arial True Type font. I will agree otherwise about 2002 but like you mentioned they started sending off and receiving information and 2000 will not do that.

Edit: Didnt find anything that was not either the font thing (apparently setting text width to other than 1 fixes this, never tried it, never knew that) and a patch issued for early versions. Didnt come across anything else other than phantom errors (still printed) and user errors.

 

No problem. I spent enough time in classes taking undimensioned sketches with just a few notes about critical dimensions and overall size that I could easily take a scan of a hand drawn sketch and make a CAD file out of it. PMing you my email if you're interested.

 

MTSU 06

 

Purdue 2009 & 2010

 

Ah, wasnt around for the 06 year.

I remember Purdue's car. Very nice. I was lucky enough to get to go to 08 and 09 VIR and Michigan competitions. Too bad we had problems like always and couldnt finish endurance.

 

Problem had to do with setup for layers and line weights for plotting being so much different from previous version.
I think there were also some model space / paper space issues.
I cant speak very well about the problems though since we just skipped that version.
I also heard the same complaints from other companies at the time and also remember getting the “OMG you have to get 2002 – problems are fixed” phone call.
Our main workhorse at the time was a TechJet plotter and some of the problem may also have been a laziness factor in setting it up.

 

and this is what i have in my garage

 

I'm so jealous. What kind of CNC setup is that? Machine, controller, CAM software?

 

To be honest i dont know much about the CNC machine, we bought BOBCAD for it and there is a computer hooked up to the machine other than that ive just seen my dad use it and thats about it. The lathe and the milling machine are more simple and i like those better lol

 

Bobcad... Ive only attempted that one a few times and it takes longer to do a 2D drawing than Pro-E

Wish I had the program the CNC machine at school uses. It took an AutoCAD .dwg 3D file uploaded directly and drew its own tool paths. Not sure of the limitations because the parts I saw being sent in were mind-numbingly simple. Thats another funny bit because the school only teaches students to use Pro-E. AutoCAD and Solidworks are learn on your own kind of stuff. Students drew the part in Pro-E, then used more software to convert it to .dwg before sending it to the machine

 

Just remembered the slip-on spacers I made for my 97 Tahoe, to bring the rear wheel track out to match the front, after I put the 17" Impala SS wheels on it. The lines are from the mill bit shaving .001" per pass, to get them perfectly flat and a consistent thickness.

Chevy truck/full sized pasenger car lug pattern, 5 on 5". For sale.....Anybody want them?

 

I made some intake runner molds on our CNC once using Pro-E and Mastercam. The program was 600,000+ lines and took 2hrs to send to the machine. Thankfully, I cammed it for 60ipm and it took only 1.5hrs to run. Awfully big program for only 4 tools.

Stephen, I'm curious. Why not do those on a lathe and then the bolt pattern on the mill? They'd turn out just as good.

 

Because I was a mill operator & knew nothing about the lathes. So I made them out of what I had for free & on the machine I knew.

 

they would probably be better off made on a mill.

It would be hard to chuck them up perfectly in a lathe and turn them down to the correct diameter.
JMO but I would have done them on the mill too.

 

You can take care of the runout and parallelness of the faces just fine on a manual lathe. Just need to spend some time checking things with a dial indicator and adjusting your chuck as needed and you're golden.

If you really wanted to be fancy, you could do the whole thing in a four jaw manual lathe just about. As long as you know what your eccentricities are, you can do anything you want on a four jaw. Although, watching a part revolve around the off center axis is somewhat disturbing. But if you got something that has an off center hole, like an intake runner, you need the four jaw.

 

i have no experience with any of software in this genre except for a tiny bit of autocad from high school. My dad said Bobcad is simple to use just have to get used to it. He uses Featurecam at work i beleive.

 

so do you guys do any sort of production with all the machines you have??

My dad and my brother do alot of LT1 stuff. They bore out stock tb to 52mm on the cnc, and do any other TB as well. They cnc port the lt1 intakes and open up the TB hole to 58mm.

 

tb pictures

 

I use SolidWorks, and Pro/E at work. I also have Autocad, but don't use it much.
I made some stuff for my 1990 Eagle Talon AWD, but no pictures. I sold it last year and got 2 Camaros and a parts Camaro. The company I work for shut down the machine shop, sold the building and stuck the engineering department in a small Office.

 

Just found my Chevy Bowtie I made years ago out of 6061 billet aluminum. 2.5" tall x 8" wide x ago....1/8" thick.

 

I'm making chips now! I work in a small CNC job shop, 24 hours by myself on the weekends, hitting cycle start on the machine that makes us all our money, with nothing better to do than browse TGO .

All I've made for my TA so far are the UHMW bushings that go inside the headlight lift motor.

Anyway, the point is, I generally have 24 hours of machine time on a Makino horizontal machining center, or my choice of several older slant bed CNC lathes, just waiting for some Third Gen project to make for the sake of making.

I have MasterCAM x4 and Solidworks, so shoot me a supported file, a print, or a napkin sketch (as long as its not too complicated, I've only been machining for a year) and I'll see what I can come up with.

 

I run manual lathes and mills and all I've done is a 2-piece 3.012" I.D. MAF housing, a shift **** and some 1/2" stainless hood pins. Would like to do more, but don't have any ideas of what I would want to do lol.

 

Wish I had your guys' talents and equiptment!!

anyone here wanna take a crack and a pulley and possibly a billet alt bracket?

 

It'd be cheaper to buy those already made since they are so common

 

Pulley I need cant be bought, need one just like mine but a bit smaller in dia. Least if someone carries it Im not aware of it same with the bracket, oddball setup