BluePrint Engines Factory Full Tour & Behind The Scenes: How Does a Crate Engine Get Made?

we've switched rolls i'm gonna try to put this together [Applause] [Music] we'll have you put on safety glasses it's really deceptive how big this building is so we'll start talking about blocks so our blocks are made in the usa they're they're cast in the midwest they come to us we get them the only thing that's really done to them is when they come out of of the foundry there's some raised metal and stuff on there so they go through and remove those so when we load them inside of the machines it doesn't throw off the machining or make it so it can't be loaded from there each one of these machines performs a different function so if you look at how a block starts when it goes in every step along the way we're just breaking up the machining into small bite-sized pieces so it's kind of like having an elephant one bite at a time that's how we machine a block so when we go in you can see that we'll start out and we'll do the end that will do the bell housing the timing cover a lot of the starting of the bolt holes and things of that nature and as you go through along the way you can see different steps have been completed so this one the lifter bores aren't done the deck isn't finished yet the oil galleys don't look like they're completely done yet so you can see the transformation from that casting and see how it's starting to look like a machine block when they come out and they're finished this is after that first operation you can see that a lot of it is still in place our second operation does a lot of rough machining so it goes through and just removes a bunch of material and then when it gets down to the end after we've got a lot of the main machining done we put on the mains you can feel that there it's not fully machined and smoothed yet oh yeah so what that what will happen is one of the coming operations they'll actually size that for the crankshaft and then after that's all done it comes out and it's going to go through our line home machine i'm going to grab somebody and show you how we do this cncs do a great job of holding very tight tolerances for us and once they come out the last step is to finish the main journal and so one of the things that we do is there'll be a little bit of coolant you've got these stones that are designed to go in and really dial in the main journal for the crankshaft so chad is going to show you how the machine operates and you'll see a theme from what what this with david you know if you look at this this machine was designed and manufactured by our team so david who explained the block washer also took the lead on this one so you'll notice the simplification from what you usually see in a line holding you tell them about the curtain yeah this is the light curtain so there's a beam that goes back and forth between these two bars and if somebody accidentally puts their hand in it or their shirt or something it'll shut the machine down right away as a safeguard like a fancy garage door it's exactly the same concept [Music] all those sprayers in there are perfectly pointed that's so cool will this just run through here once or do you make multiple passes wow one pass those are very specific stones that were designed for this application once it goes through and does that pass it's sized and ready to go um that won't get touched again until we start installing bearings and it'll go through a wash tank but that micro sizer takes it to the point where it's ready for the the main journal bearings to be installed that's crazy so it goes from the raw bumped out like unfinished state to ready to rock in one pass just like that and this is a pretty cool shot when you look at the number of blocks each one of these different colored sheets of paper is sticking out of it tells us it's for a different engine application so you think about the block itself there will be provisions for fuel pumps yeah where you can see it's got the fuel pump and mechanical fuel pump holes machined in it there will be other ones over here you can see that it's not machined in there and then we have a block where we've got a piston oiler in it and so those those other ones over there there's an actual hole where you can put a manifold in there and put oil on the pistons and turbo applications now if you feel you remember that step you felt on the other side yeah that steps completely gone yeah that's like done done you can't feel it at all exactly these are all v8 small block chevy um kind of your 350 to 383 application for our product line that's what you see the space is in the plant it's for capital expansion where we can buy new equipment put it in place to do more and more of our own blocks is our small blocks like your most volume popular product line both from the industrial side and also on the performance side that's where most of our volume is at right now after they are lined up in the field of dreams here where do they go after that so when these guys are done they'll go right over to the cylinder hone so in the cylinder hole this this mower for the piston is about 98 complete over there we use some honing stones and we can go over and take a look at that when they do that you're really doing two things you're making sure you get a good cross hatch inside the cylinder and a good placo finish what's exceptional so this area here is all being cleared out from so this is the cylinder hole you can see there's a there's a tool head in there that's rotating and moving up and down and you can see what it's doing here inside of the machine so each block has its own uh targets that they have to hit when they machine and this is the machine that makes sure that that's how they get finished so you can take into account you can put in the amount of stock you need to remove you can make sure that you remove or have the right amount of paper inside of the cylinder so when this is finished we know that it's ready for pistons to be installed what's the actual transportation process from the block from that thing to over here yeah so they will actually grab the block by either the main journal or certain holes here and they can pick it up and transport it and put it inside the machine so once the blocks come in on the pallet the rest of the way it gets lifted and brought all the way down the line from there it gets put on this table so this is that manual walk we saw the robotic washer before so you can see there are two tanks for it so again we're able to combine and minimize the footprint that it takes which allows us to put more equipment in the plant on this side you've got a really hot wash that gets everything loosened up from the process and on the other side you're doing a brush wash and getting the rust for a bit in the bottom so they don't rust as they go through this is where everything comes together to finish that block it won't be machined after this step so what this does is it takes a block that's already been so if we buy one that we didn't see in c machine here we have to go in and boom out sometimes if you have a block that's a four inch bore and you want to go to a four inch 40 you do that in that machine the other thing that you're doing in that machine is you're doing the final pass on the deck is this the original version of what that is though you can see it's a very manual process for the operator they go through they remove stock and then they inspect each one of those journals to make sure that it's right if if one size you know if you think about wear and tear from an older uh vintage casting the caps in the journals man it may have worn a little bit differently so this helps make sure that you true up each one individually and that's what he's checking right now with his gauge after an engine is washed we put in the camshaft and the cam bearings it goes through the paint booth we've got a couple of different options you can see we've got like a raw ls block which people really like that option we've got the old spool uh chevy orange as an option and then for some of our ford engines we've got a ford blue that we paint the engines and really what it allows um customers to do if they have a preference they can they can paint the block whatever color they want otherwise they can just take our base option how does the paint booth work i want to see that it's a very manual process we'll go around them this place is intense now this block is prepped to be painted so you can see how we put plugs and magnets we blocked that stuff off so you don't get any paint inside there it's just like you're used to seeing somebody painting it by hand they'll go through and they'll make sure that they get all the angles and rotate it they'll flip it up so we can paint the bell housing and it gets a really nice finish coming out of the booth it's simple and it's effective and it really works for what we're trying to do just a magnet this is like a refrigerator magnet exactly that's so cool you got some stuff that's like super refined cutting edge technology and then magnets and paint booths yeah and if you think about it like that's just a different size soft plug we're willing to invest but we want our investment to go where it adds the most value for our customers investing in cnc equipment and a really tight tolerance capable equipment is really important for us for us whether you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sophisticated paint booth or you use some magnets and have somebody do it by hand the quality ends up being the same in the end so you know as our volume goes up the capital investment to put an automated booth in might make a lot more sense for what we're producing today having somebody do it by hand still works for us very well now you can see like this is for like a to be like for a ford you can see how it's blue the water pump surface on a ford is different than a water pump surface on a small block chevy and the finished ones roll over there yeah we've got we've we're in the process because of our volume of splitting up the line so this line right here is is a is a lower volume high mix line so this line would run this is a big block chevy this is a big block chevy that's a 509 we would run our 632s 572s down this line eventually our ls's will run down this line and you can see everywhere you see a blue station the operators have built their own workstation for use inside of the line so we give them the ability to set up their workstation in a way that means more to them instead of me saying this is how your station is going to be they get the chance to go through and set that up so this is a new line that's in development for us um where we'll be installing technology like a head robot which we're going to see here in a little bit things of that nature but on this line an operator would do the crank the timing the lifters you know they're going to do multiple steps in one so they have to do more steps when we get to the main assembly line you'll see the build is broke down into like 15 or 20 minute chunks where it's crank install timing install rear seal install piston install oil pan install and it's broke up so we we develop our assembly line based off of what volume we need to hit for the day so we look at the tact time which you think about a drum beat you think about you need to hit a certain target every so often we set up the line to meet that demand is that uh is that part of your job is to like configure all of this stuff yeah so what i you know there's a couple of parts that go with running the shop one is making sure that you have all of the parts in place that we need to have the second is making sure that you get the right people in the right spot doing the right thing and so we invest a lot of time and technology to make that easier for the operator when we first started a lot of the people in the plant probably have the capability to do a lot more of the engine build themselves and as we've increased in size we just have to teach people to be really good at one or two operation as opposed to knowing how to build the whole engine coach you ready yeah ninjas got it so you've got more equipment designed by our engineering team and so i'll give you a quick high-level overview then we'll let ninja show you how it works but if you think about installing rings on a pissed in the old-school way you either got lots of bloody fingers or you got a pair of pliers and you're trying to get that spread and get on there and seated properly the other thing too is if you're doing you know if you're doing thousands of pistons in a day it could be you know one of the failures you could have is to miss a ring which is bad in an engine so our engineering team developed a process that would make it so even somebody who's never done it before like yourself could step in here and be able to install the rings in the right order on the pistons and then once that's done to be able to install the connecting rod in the wrist pin to the piston so we're gonna have him show you how this works and then if you want somebody else to take the camera we'll get a video of it being so simple that somebody who's never done it before should be able to do it but i say never done it before never ran it on this machine um yeah i've only i've done it a couple times you know by hand it's not that fun but you'll have an appreciation for this after after seeing it so ninja why don't you explain to them what you're doing right now we just got a standard 350 kind of piston here you've got your valve releases here there's a little notches there's basically no way that this will run without it installed properly the right way like it could be upside down and it will not work so it won't fit in there with those notches yeah yeah if you put the notches in there and it doesn't trip those two pieces right there the machine won't fire yeah and so when we talk about mistake proofing and preventing stuff from being done wrong that's one of the things that's designed into the machine is for this operation the only thing that operator really has to pay attention to is to make sure that our logo is face up on that rod if they do that we've removed everything else to try to prevent you from putting the piston on backwards we got a magnet here kind of holds the wrist pin up there that's locked and loaded now he's going to heat up the piston so sometimes you'll see people using like a propane burner and almost like a grill top to heat up the pan end yeah we got the old school way set up over there but this is all induction heating it heats it up to about 600 degrees there for you it usually goes about five seconds [Music] slide it over here that wrist panel just pushed right in set up perfectly positioned perfectly right there for you so if you think about everything that can go wrong with getting the wrist pin the rod and the piston together getting them off center having them get stuck not having them be the right temperature and things like that this is all designed by our engineering team to be able to control as much of that as possible so when we talk about reducing the complexity if that's the only thing you really have to worry about as an operator and not getting burned that's pretty pretty simplified from what we're used to doing does ninja make mistakes okay not as much on the automated stuff all right ninja you want to train him how to do this and then we'll uh we'll let him take a crack at it uh yeah this is so easy we have like a nine-year-old kid do it it'll have all these indications of which uh direction he'll go whatever so you just look at the picture copy the picture yeah you just stick it in there and it puts the rings right on for you so that one's going up or whatever stick it in there you got your first oil rail on so when you press it in there it hits that button and yeah it's actually a magnet i think where the magnet will hit so when it's in there in the right spot right then it'll depress and yep okay press and shoot one out at a time pretty amazing flip it over 180 degrees and stick it in your next one you'll put your other oil rail right on there for you so then that's one holder scale 45 or 90 290. there's your second ring a whole do one 180 right here and then there's your top line that's very satisfying to watch yes sir is it my turn now yeah if you want let's go ahead okay let's see if i can figure this out if a nine year old could do it i think i'll be all right screen goes dark and you want to see what you're doing just touch it again and that'll light back up okay so now we've switched rolls i'm gonna try to put this together i'm taking this now the most important thing is to have a big smile on your face while you do this so everybody knows how fun this is yeah so we put it up with the f on the top yep because there's no f on this side i noticed that already so using my brain here [Music] yep pull it out make sure it seats there you go and the next step is going to be one of the first oil rings just a slight rotation the machine will feed the ring on there for you all right see it's in place the other side now might have been a little bit of a delay from how long it was in there probably fed a second one i messed it up yeah this is so easy we had like a nine-year-old kid do it you're doing it in the right sequence we'd probably have to coach you a little bit on speed after some training there you go remove good the final final two rings very very important i did it but i messed up once now so from there then it's ready to have the the connecting rod installed to it which we just covered so ninja wants to show us it's a game speed we want why we call them ninja we want to that was only about 50 seconds faster than your time so now you know how good you can be once you're trained like a ninja yeah go to ninja school fun place to work heck yeah it's awesome hearing the motors runs pretty awesome too you get a big block going kind of gets your your adrenaline going too while you're working when they're done oh yeah we got some guys who will let out a big whoo every time we dine to an engine it sounds great does he put things together faster when there's a big block on the dyno like you know what i haven't paid attention enough to find that out he's happier when we're running big blocks all day so they built that whole machine in back there yep that's awesome did the design they ordered the components they assembled and installed that programmed it and everything so we didn't actually fabricate the 80 20 or the boxes we bought all that but the assembly and everything was done by us all right so now we're in assembly one of the things you'll notice right away is there are less manual torque wrenches and more dedicated specific tools so you can look on the left side here these are dc torque tools it's got a pre-programmed setting that they have to hit one is for the center bolt and then one is for the display bolt on a four bolt main so when they go through and torque instead of having to do it all by hand or run it in with an air inch and then finish it this will actually drive that in and seat the bolt and make sure that it gets torqued to the right set so from an investment standpoint you've talked about the size of the facility it's probably at least two times larger than our previous facility and around the plant you're going to continue to see upgrades and investment and technology so the light system that you see around the plant that's to help the operator out so you got one right here if you get a yellow light it means that you've got a part shortage you've got a red light it means there's a quality issue if you got a green light it means everything is running good so we're trying to increase our ability to support the team that's doing all of the hard work by getting the engines put together or the little tricks like that stuff that you brought here from your background yeah if you go…