BOOSTING THE FLEXIBILITY OF PERFORMANCE EXHAUST MANUFACTURING

Fabspeed Motorsports (Philadelphia, PA) builds high performance exhausts and air intakes for a wide range of prestige vehicle makes, including Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche. The company's mission is to provide customers with quality performance products, competitive pricing and unparalleled service. Its attention to detail throughout the exhaust and intake design and production process ensures quality.

Its Maxflo brand of performance exhaust system designs are developed by purchasing the brand of vehicle in question and then carefully re-engineering the system – changing and optimizing the layout and flow shape to obtain a noticeable increase in power and an attractive sports car sound. Fabspeed systems are also polished to a mirror show car shine for ultimate quality and appearance.

The designs are then tested on the company's own dynamometer and on the road before release. Fabspeed Motorsports has over 16,000 sq ft of fabrication, sales and warehouse space in its Philadelphia location, plus a large dedicated manufacturing space at its U.S.-based subcontract manufacturing partner.

Over almost 20 years the company has built a unique reputation for creating exhausts that increase an engine's usable power output and deliver a unique sound – and the brand now sells globally. Up until now, the production process for these exhausts has been based on assembling the required exhaust configuration by cutting and welding together modular stainless steel 304L component shapes – such as U-bends and J-bends – fabricated by the metalworking subcontractor. This production process has provided a lot of flexibility and cost effectiveness, but it means that Fabspeed must order in bulk, create waste by cutting vehicle-specific exhaust shapes from larger general-purpose components, and perform more assembly steps than are ideally necessary.

To address these issues, Fabspeed ordered an all-electric tube bending machine from Unison to enhance the manufacturing flexibility of its advanced exhaust systems for performance cars. This machine will allow the fabricator to bring much of its tube bending processes in-house and provide numerous benefits, including reducing the cost of building an exhaust, which shortens lead times and extends the flexibility of the company's custom design services.

The new bending machine will allow Fabspeed to simplify the production process for the more complex exhaust shapes it manufactures. Parts of exhaust systems that used to be TIG-welded from two or three component shapes will now be fabricated in a single stage – without making any cut-off waste. Material purchasing costs will be reduced because the company will now be able to make parts to demand from tube lengths, rather than ordering and stocking much larger batches of shapes. The machine also provides much greater flexibility to customize – allowing it to employ exotic lightweight materials such as titanium, or to vary the shape and sound of designs, all to meet the needs of individual clients.

The machine Fabspeed selected is a servomotor-controlled bender that is fitted with a multi-stack tooling head to handle a range of mild steel and stainless steel tube diameters up to 3 in (76 mm). The all-electric architecture and design was chosen because of the machine's Unibend V10-PC Based Control System Using Windows XP software-controlled repeatability and simplicity of use, and for its quietness and cleanliness in a workshop environment handling many of the world's most prestigious road vehicles, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and more.

The new system can empty-bend mild steel tube with a 4 mm wall thickness, and stainless steel tube with a 3 mm wall thickness. Bending with a mandrel and wiper die can process mild steel tube with up to 2.3 mm wall thickness, and stainless steel tube with a 1.5 mm wall thickness. The machine has a maximum clearance of 304 mm (4D)(11.96 in). The maximum tube bend angle is 190 deg and the machine operates at a quiet noise level of 50 db to 60 db, which is the same as voice level. It also uses Internet off site diagnostics and black box diagnostics.

"This machine is intrinsically simple to set up and use," says product development manager Tony Wells of Fabspeed. "It means that any of our technicians can be trained easily to use it and deliver precision, right-first-time results. The machine is going to enhance our production process, and give us even more flexibility to meet the demands of our clients – who typically want the very best, and an individual solution."

The machine was sold to Fabspeed by Unison's U.S. sales and support partner, Horn Machine Tools (Madera, CA). "The accuracy and repeatability of an all-electric tube bender is very well suited to this application, which requires the production of very complex shapes because of the restricted space in engine compartments, and it also gives the company a lot more flexibility of development," added Kent Horn of Horn Machine Tools.

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Horn Machine Tools, 40473 Brickyard Drive, Madera, CA 93638, 559-431-4131, www.hornmachinetools.com, [email protected].

Fabspeed Motorsports, 283 North Main Street, Ambler, PA 19002-5065, 215-646-4945, www.fabspeed.com, [email protected].