BluePrint Engines Factory Full Tour & Behind The Scenes: Engineering Dept and R&D Zone! (Its Wild)

is for a small block chevy block the internal design has ls ports basically have you ever thought about putting one of these together completely out of printed stuff and trying to fire it and see how long it took to melt yeah we think about that all the time actually so this is our research and development department uh we're doing some uh dyno testing on a 632 right now that might be kind of fun to watch we got it right over here in our first dyno cell this is actually our dyno mule so we've had this engine around the research and development department we've done all of all of our camshaft testing cylinder head testing induction all sorts of fuel systems this has been the mule engine that we've used for that it's it's got right around 800 dyno poles on it up to 65 7 000 rpm so it's it's it's had a hard life but it's it's still running great but uh with that many pulls on it do you think it'll still make the like close to the advertised number i think we're going to find out is this area here just for r d or like don't you dyno every motor that comes out of here yeah so we dyno test every engine at blueprint engines this is just the research and development department so we have three dyno cells in here where we do all of our development work and out on the manufacturing floor we have another four dinos for blueprint engines every every engine we we build we dyno test is that like fresh air intake for these this is all intake air going into the dino cells okay that's pretty intense looking yeah you know when you're doing development work on some of this product these dyno cells will get really really hot especially in the middle of the summer because you could be doing a steady state hole at 5000 rpm while you're doing calibration work and when you're doing that you're obviously emitting a ton of heat so even though we have ducting this size on a hot day there sometimes we cannot keep these dyno cells cool enough even though we're moving i don't know 12 million cfm don't quote me on that i don't know what it is it looks like a lot of air [Music] what i do 839 839 i thought this thing was an ls motor when i walked by it ah so this is a this is a new product that we're working on it's going to be a coil near plug small block ford engine uh we're throwing the holley high rise intake manifold on it we've got a drive by wire throttle body on it just same thing you'd see in an lt corvette we're putting our own fuel system on it uh where we've got our own ecms our own harnesses this is in cylinder pressure test equipment so each each one of these combustion chambers on the end on the ends of the heads we have one typically when we do the development work we'll have a pressure sensor in every combustion chamber the reason we don't on a ford is because the cylinder head actually only has one spot in it where you can put a pressure transducer and that's on the end of the head is it allows us to really refine the tune on this engine so when we're going through all of our base uh calibration work with with spark fuel all that we can monitor what's going on inside of the combustion chamber during all of our development work so we know if we're getting any kind of knock peaks at certain rpm ranges certain loads we know that we've got to do some more calibration work with the spark tables the other thing it allows us to do is is to make sure that we're getting a correct flame propagation inside of the combustion chamber you really want to aim for a mass fraction burn of 50 so that what that means is anywhere from eight to 11 degrees after top dead center you really want half of your combustion process already through it's through the process so you want to time it in a way to where yes you know you got you got some serious like data measurement going on here a lot a lot beyond what i thought you did here like even for me yeah this is this is like some serious serious stuff yeah so so it really is oem grade equipment i mean there there aren't a lot of companies out there using this avl equipment you know you obviously got your oems uh ford gm chrysler they're all using this stuff yeah it's really a great tool for us for all of our calibration work it really lets us refine the tune the engine is going to be safe for the customers we can we'll go through multiple different fuel grades we've got 87 octane on a switch we've got 91 octane ready to go we'll build spark tables for each fuel so so when we advertise an engine that says 91 octane only we've done the development work to know that if you put 87 octane in it you're gonna knock it so with our new fuel systems that we're working on we'll be able to switch so we'll have knock sensing into the system to where if a customer like ah yeah i know you say 8 91 i can't i can't get to 91 i got to put 87 in it today the knock sensors are going to pick that up and they're going to pull timing out of it and run a different timing table so it makes it makes our engines really bulletproof which is what we want we we're just really trying to eliminate anything that the customer can do wrong to accidentally hurt the engine so this is like an aftermarket oem powertrain like this sounds a lot like a factory computer yeah it kind of has all the fail safes in it but this is like a aftermarket drop-in yeah so so that's that's the idea it it 100 is an oem ecm what is that you got a transmission on there yeah so uh we've recently introduced the new line of engines um it's called our builder series line so we know that a lot of our customers don't want to mess with buying just a crate engine they you know our customers want it simple now it's not like it used to be so so we're offering engines with a complete front accessory drive on them all the way through the end of the transmission so it really is a turn key drop drop-in solution for the guys that need that uh we're going to take all that guess work out of it for you and we're just going to ship it to you ready to go it's freaking awesome i think stuff like this and stuff like that are going to like help get more older cars on the road like you know grow the grow the hobby in the interest to make it easy for people who want to do it exactly that's the idea there's a lot of people that see all this and they get intimidated by it we want to take the intimidation factor out of that this is the cool room back here like i was here all the time this is right hang out you're messing with stuff and we get to work on all the fun stuff that's for sure what is this particular motor for so this is a 3.6 liter engine that will be used in industrial applications so for years industrial companies have purchased regular engines and converted them for industrial use and generators oil fields uh powered data centers things like that and so as gm as that gets exited out of making those it provides an opportunity for us to use our performance industry knowledge and apply it to industrial applications so the two help each other out as uh you can see that looks like a small block forward head yep yep and that's one of the things that we have the ability to do is to take things that we've experienced in our past through our other applications and figure out what combinations will work work well together and really our goal is to get the customer what they need and that provides us with an opportunity to to do some things you wouldn't get to do with a standard oem application so when we design an engine one of the things we want to make sure of before we get too much money invested in it is that everything fits together so our engineering team is able to use our 3d printer and use actual hardware that we have today and project we're going to be using in the future and as they do that they can take the 3d model and make sure everything fits up properly so like for this engine we've already got an existing oil pan but now we're going to have a timing cover made for us we're going to have a block made for us we're going to have exhaust manifolds made for us so this allows us to take a 3d plastic part assemble it with our parts and make sure that when we get everything in it'll fit together and function just fine for us so this is like your design engine block yep you know it's based off of an existing design and it's being modified with our individual components that that meet with the customer needs so you'll see sensors in place you haven't traditionally seen sensors you'll see bolt up bosses and things like that for areas that you wouldn't typically see them on on these engines and you know we work with our our customers to design what they need i think stuff like this is a lot more interesting than you guys probably think it is to the people who are watching this exactly yeah that's you know it's no matter what line of business you're in it's really cool to see a big old lego version of a model and it's like yeah it's like adult tinker toys and legos after you do all the design work you still have to get it to fit together and just like that when you're building at home you start to put pieces together and you say well you know these two here you're going to have to design them in a specific order you might not get that timing cover to fit in there just right so you learn a lot about how you're going to build the engine just by putting that model together yeah that's that's awesome i mean this is the first thing i wanted to walk over and look at when i walked in here so well and there's a when you see the next room too they're going to be a lot of individual components that they will look like hybrids of things you've never seen before and our engineering team has figured out a way to to combine two designs to make them functional what's that can we check that out yeah that's where we're heading next all right let's go over there who's taking the lead on the table frank so we're gonna check out how this cmm machine works so it'll come on this face and we'll measure several different of these features this is a really action-packed process so you'll test like uh random samples out of batches and yeah to make sure everything's like no core shift or anything weird like that's happening yep exactly to know what their machine tools are wearing out or need replaced first thing i saw when i walked in here was all this stuff all this all this 3d printed stuff is it's like a bug light here this is like all the fun stuff we've made so what do you are you one of the guys that draws this stuff yep i'm one of the engineers here okay i have about four or five of design engineers and then there's a group of manufacturing engineers too there's about four or five of them as well so i think you don't do much talking to a camera not too much nope not much specialty in engineering we use a software called solidworks i don't know if you've ever seen that before yeah it's like a 3d modeling software so we'll come up with a part we want to make and we'll sit down at the computer and we'll start drawing this part up so we'll already have our block made and our heads so like if we want to design a valve cover we'll actually sit down and model do a 3d model with valve cover and then once we get it all working in solidworks the way we want it to we'll take this and we'll send it over to our 3d printer and we'll print it off and then we can take this and actually try it on a real engine so obviously you can't run it on the engine but you can you can check fit and function and make sure it does what it's supposed to so this is the prototype and finished products yep exactly exactly yeah there's some cylinder heads we've done not everybody gets to see a cylinder head on the inside it's a really high quality printer yeah i think i think it goes down to ten thousands flares there's some better ones out there now but it still does pretty good job sometimes we'll do things that are modifications to oem and sometimes we'll do stuff like these are one-off things that only we have this would be an example of one that's something that is a modification of an oem i don't know if you guys ever seen like the 350 chevy timing cover yeah they're usually like a plastic one we're having problems with those braking back here when we use certain oil pans they'd crack and then they leak so we decided to make our own version out of aluminum and the good thing about that is it doesn't crack anymore and then we developed our own gasket to go inside there so the gasket um can be reused where the original timing cover won if you used it and took it off you had to throw it away yeah so this one does that we also change it so we can use different sensors down here and we can modify this for different machining if you want to use different crank stubs dude that's pretty cool have you ever um just thought about i mean obviously you probably have all the different components printed putting one of these together completely out of printed stuff and trying to fire it and see how long it took to melt yeah we think about that all the time actually why is that never happened yet i think we need like a slow-motion video camera we need to do that yeah i would drive 10 hours back here just for that now we're getting better i think yeah leave a comment if you want to see these guys put together a 3d printed engine and melt it with actual trying to make it run yep we're in for that i'm so down what else interesting is in here let's see ls uh oil pan something we're working on fairly new actually this is totally new we haven't came out with that yet but that's our first cast piece something really cool over here this is a cylinder head that is for a small block chevy block but it mates up to well actually the internal design has ls ports basically ls ports and combustion chambers so that's kind of one of our one-off things we worked on that for a customer can't say who but we worked on that for a customer and i kind of left off at this point but it does make quite a bit more power in what you can do with the small block chevy so would it use an ls intake manifold do we actually have custom intake manifolds made for that they're probably similar to an ls but these ones are full one-off customs that's wild here's the plenum for it intake plenum 3d print wow that's like a new school version of the the clever thing out there that's wild i've never seen anything like that before here's the this is how we developed it we actually start with the ports and the combustion chamber and kind of start building around that and we'll we'll do those get them kind of the way we want them just the force and combustion chambers first then we'll take those do a 3d print and we'll take them to our flow bench and we'll run it on the flow bench and we'll make sure we're getting the flow we're looking for if we don't we'll maybe play around with some clay put that in there make some tweaks and then we'll go back to three ma 3d model make some more tweaks and then send it back to the printer and do another one and once we get it done then we'll start building the rest of the stuff that's around around the boards and finish the rest of the head so what's your background how did you end up here my background i started out as in engineering design and drafting and uh i've been doing this type of stuff for like 25 years worked at a generator manufacturer for a long time i saw the advertisement and it looked really fun so i joined the crew because i find cars yeah yeah i've always been into cars and engines so this is just like playing with hot wheels cars except for big time yeah yeah really this one here it's kind of cool we we wanted a way to cool off our big block chevy for a special customer uh that was running some turbocharged engines like plus a thousand foot-pounds of torque kind of ridiculous amounts and they couldn't cool it off and there wasn't a water pump out there that would do it so we actually developed this housing to go on the front of their big block engine and it holds this uh cartridge water pump which will push like three times the water through the engine is that cartridge like from something else and you made the housing to fit that exactly this is actually from a caterpillar engine so we made that caterpillar pump fit onto our big block chevy that's kind of stuff i think is really cool yeah this is like hot rodding in a nutshell right here yep that's just an off-the-shelf part and we have this housing this housing was actually used with a 3d sand printed process so we take the model we send it to a vendor and they'll print the mold and and sand and then they pour the metal into the sand mold and take it out so it's a lot slower process and more expensive this one this particular part here cost like five thousand dollars i think we had like nine of those made and that was just to prove the part out and uh once we got it proved out then we did the official version i don't think people really understand how much money goes into the development of something that ends up on their car yeah yeah the the prototyping costs are pretty high but once you get it figured out what you want the end cost comes down quite a bit all right what are we talking about this is dave bugner he's one of the manufacturing engineers and he's going to show you the parts washer okay so what we're trying to do here is uh take any of the employee air out of the process so we built everything you see in front of you and sourced all the components what it does is it will use a laser to identify what kind of block you've loaded into the machine it will rotate the block and a robotic arm seen there will actually move around like a pressure washer and get every single bolt hole every single coil galley so you're basically assured of perfect cleanliness once the block is is washed we'll have a robot unload the block and reload a new one there'll be an air dryer that will also blow the block off so it's all all dry ready for assembly coming out um this particular machine will do our our v8s our v6s i've never seen a cnc parts washer before yep so this is just like something you're you're working on this right now like this doesn't currently operate yep right now i'm actually at my computer writing the uh the program to communicate between all the equipment outside to talk with the robot that's inside of it interesting and then it'll so we've got a large water tank that'll be heated to about 140 degrees and a cyclonic filter system that will basically spin out all the particles so you're guaranteed to have perfectly pure water we won't use any soap we're planning on just using a rust preventative so once it's dry it won't rust and it should be ready to go alright let's have a interesting observation on this like how you said that the this takes out the employee error and people are probably going to think oh well you know you use robots for everything then there's less jobs but all i see are people in here building this stuff so like absolutely and the number of people we're able to hire in this area jobs are not a problem we we can't hire enough people for what we need to do so i guarantee you if a robot replaces somebody here he's still in the plant he just got moved to a new place so we can get more engines out the door at the end of the day it's not a matter of eliminating jobs it's just a matter of putting those people where they can get more done for us yeah i think that's really cool stuff like this this is like this whole machine project has nothing to do with like the actual what goes out the door in the engine but people don't see that there are people who their only job is to do this kind of stuff yeah yeah and it is a process of just brushes and sprayers and non-stop all day long one block after another after another and this will this will free them up to do something that you know they can really maybe enjoy a little more too yeah i'd say so the quality the quality…