BluePrint Engines Factory Full Tour UPDATE! Whats New? (Josh Answers YOUR Questions!)

how are you doing oh yeah that's what we're here for do you think it's possible to make a 3d printed engine run long enough to melt the plastic that's a great question i hope we find out someday okay did you guys talk about concrete work yet no all right so we just poured this concrete yesterday we're putting six new horizontal machining centers in and so the concept here is as we expand our markets expand our offering we want to machine more blocks in house so this concrete's less than 24 hours old and hopefully the next time you guys come around there will be new cnc equipment here that'll allow us to do our new block small block fords in addition to the chevy uh derivative stuff that we're machining today for performance and industrial applications josh how thick is the concrete i think it's about two foot thick two feet so there's they dug it down there's a pit this big and then there's just a rows and rows of rebar in there to provide it with structure one of the things that help that helps us with because it helps us be more precise in our machining does that actually make a difference it actually does if you don't have thick enough concrete over time you know with the vibration from the machines and everything if you don't have proper support it can settle or crack and then you're having to go in realign the equipment to make sure all of the finished dimensions are inspected oh something i thought i'm just running through here what are comments that i had seen a lot from the first video and what comes to mind is people did not understand the concept that uh for the small block stuff everything was pre like machined within a certain tolerance that you can just put it together without checking it they didn't seem to think that they're like oh they didn't even check this didn't even check that so maybe we could explain that and the the big long line home um people get saved like oh well how does that work they just it's big and long and it has to flex like well i don't know we've got we've got some guys back in engineering that can talk to you about the lion hone uh for a lot of our processes we're qs certified iso certified so what that means is we've got gauges and inspection plans that tell the operators what frequency they have to do those inspections so we check the bore we check the main journal we check all of the bolt holes and then we've got a cmm where we pull blocks out of production and go back and do an inspection to make sure everything's still in alignment that's what i thought but i guess that's why people ask questions why there's a comment function yeah i know that's that's good and you know your viewers aren't any different than our customers they ask us the same questions just show them the heat or have them feel the heat you'll feel the difference in the heat coming up this is cooler than it was this morning but if you feel that heat you can feel the heat rising off of it yeah is that just from a drying yeah so yesterday they started mixing concrete at like 3 30 4 o'clock in the morning that's when they brought it in started pouring it by the time we had moved to the next section that that side is already starting to dry out and set in due to the heat yeah there's a lot of uh things that we have to do your viewers have lots of questions but so do our customers so on the machines we've got control plans we've got a gauging station where we do an inspection and then it's part of the final check before assembly the blocks are inspected 100 we make sure that the bore and the deck height and the align hone are all inspect so you can see the gauging station there every block that we machine that piece of paper is for the next block to come out so when the operator does their inspection they'll record critical dimensions and then they'll sign off that they completed the check okay yeah i think some people probably just thought oh you just run that through there and put it together like yeah no that's not how it works at all our customers you know they require a high level of precision and accuracy and so that's exactly what we demand of ourselves so since the last time you were here we've moved machines around we've increased our capacity and then that was before we actually purposed our purchase new capital and equipment to come in due to the demand that we've had our sea of blocks is actually lower because we've been going through and producing at such a high rate and even with the level of production that we're doing it's really difficult for us to keep getting everything out as quickly as we want it to um so you could say it's low tide exactly we're trying to get it built back up one of the things that you asked about it's not from this block he's not running it now but we use air gauging in the plant so after a block is will actually go through and use the air gauging to check the the main journal so you know when he's machining he's actually using a dial board indicator gauge to go in and do that inspection when he does the manual machining but for a lot of our automotive machining one of our chests will be to go through and do an inspection of the main journal the air gauge is a lot more dialed in so you can set it up and not have to change it as much as opposed to this one you've got variability in different setups for the different types of main journal diameters this one you can change the ring gauge and change the settings and get it programmed and then you can go through and do an inspection that's cool i think this is all really really useful for the i don't know just the nitty gritty of it that video is still 47 minutes long but you just you can't fit all of it in there we could we could have had a four hour version of and it still wouldn't have had everything in there yeah that's you know our our goal is every time we gotta hold on todd yeah we gotta you gotta we gotta do the hair flip here oh yeah that's what we're here for how are we doing never better thank you well that was that was necessary okay we've actually he's actually become his own screen saver on a computer so it's immortalized in time if it ever changes we still got a good image of todd did you put that as like the background on the website for like a day national mullet day we might we might have a good idea actually yeah we're not we don't have the fort wayne man but we've got todd i don't know if you guys are familiar with the fort wayne bowling man i don't think so it's a facebook great webpage and they've got him and this guy shows up around town and he's a celebrity where people take their pictures with them drink beer with them we got lots of guys who want to say how to talk yeah our our goal every time we bring people through the plants you know if they've gone a couple of months since their last visit we try to continually change and upgrade our facility so in the area that you're in now we did the piston ring installation last time we've also increased the capacity of the line we're running multiple shifts but then we also do things like move installation to help with flow so you can see the blue racks are in place again built by the operators to go along with the stations for what they need and as we go around the other side you'll see we've added some new operations into the line it does the other thing i think the lights are new yeah so jeff so when we're running on the line you've got different lights you can flip so we can we can turn a light on for qc and if if the lights on and somebody's walking by and they see it they'll know that we need support at the line and then the other line tells you if there's a parts outage what that allows us to do in the plant is any manager walking through at any time can see that see if there's an issue that needs address so if the assembly supervisor isn't here one of us can stop in and help out something else i just remembered is uh i don't think some people grasp the concept of how you design and have your own parts produced to be put in here they're that are proprietary yours yeah and how that relates to like like gm like gm doesn't cast their own pistons they get them from somewhere else because they design them like can you explain that similarity and how that actually works yeah so we've got an engineering design department we'll do designs based off of necessity based off of customer requirements and we'll also do it based off of ease of manufacturing so these are our cylinder heads um you can see it's got our blueprint logo on them and so those are made specifically for us to our design we've got a couple of different styles that those are used for i think we've got three different individual part numbers on the industrial side we've got performance side you keep going don't let yourself and so as we go through and make design improvements one of the things you know that's specific or you know this has the ability to take a center bolt valve cover and a perimeter bolt valve cover oh yeah so we increase the number of perimeter bolt valve covers that we use we're actually going to make the product specifically for the perimeter bolt and we're also going to make revisions to have a center bolt so with some of the tbi engines and some of the older style uh you know vortex style heads they take that center bolt we still want to accommodate that but a lot of our production is is set up specifically for that perimeter last time we talked about pistons so when we develop that piston installer we actually work with the piston manufacturer to change the ring land location so it can be more consistent so we could put more engines through and use that technology and those are when those engines go through there the small block chevys that is the same engine every time that is a the like for the industrial stuff yes i think a lot some people don't know that really discern the difference that a lot of the stuff in here is um the same unit for an industrial application so every piece is the same every time so a lot of what we do there will be differences like in chamber volume there might be differences and how the intake mount melts up but at the core a lot of the engines have a lot of similarity where the differences happen really are the components inside of the engine you've got different pistons you've got different types of material of pistons different styles of rockers things of that nature so conceptually the block is going to be the same for everything that we produce on the mounting surfaces but internal to that it's different for all of the different applications that we have that makes sense yeah yeah it does because there's you know in people's heads the crate engine is it's performance it's supposed to be custom every time but they don't that one they don't understand the volume two they don't understand or maybe they didn't catch the part of the industrial stuff that's very similar there's a lot of commonalities between it that allows us to produce them in similar operations as we go through it but there are differences so like we've got different styles of engines they have different compression ratios different you got a one piece rear seal two-piece rear seal so there are some specific differences in the application due to the add-on components and things you can pick but the rest of it you know the it's not that different to install a cylinder head if it's got a different internal design and a combustion chamber for example yeah exactly some of the other things you can see the long block on an industrial engine like this one is going to be the same it's going to be like for this engine specifically the industrial block is very similar it's a 10.3 liter engine it's very similar to a 632 cubic inch engine in terms of production but what goes inside of it is different then you have different configurations you've got you know different pulleys based off of what customers need the water pumps will be relatively the same the coils the ecm that's where it starts getting different based off of the application we're in a state of transition so this setup has only been this way for about two weeks and it's probably going to last another 60 days and then as we move moving pieces around the plant the layout will change so if we go through here this is a fairly temporary location for a lot of the stuff but when you have this change planned how long before you actually start moving stuff do you plan out okay this thing's gonna go here we're gonna move this line over there you're gonna go this way how is that all mapped out well before you move things we start doing the plans probably 12 months to six months before we actually do the move and then as we go through and do different revisions of the plan that's how we finalize stuff so like this layout was finalized probably about two weeks before we actually put it in place so you know we put a staging area for industrial engines you can see that the operators go through and get stuff prepped up for installation so instead of the guy at the line doing the assembly unboxing everything we've got people who will unbox it and stage it so that way they can be installed more quickly and the last time you guys were here we were installing intake distributors carburetors things of that nature all down here now that's moved back up into the flow of the assembly line from there the dyno operation is still the dyno operation every engine still gets a dyno sheet every engine is still 100 percent dyno testing for us you can see more integration of the blue rack so you know as we gear up we've added a third shift to help try to increase our dyno capacity and give us more flexibility so you know a lot of high level changes from the last time you guys are here but we're still making as many good engines as we can whenever you're under phases of transition like this um does it slow down production or have you ever gone to change something moved things around and thought wow this weird way actually works better than we had it before we're just going to kind of leave it like that you get both so like for example this move here this box that has the dyno and all of the computer equipment in it it was picked up on a wednesday afternoon our engineering team worked you know they split shifts and they worked long days during the day they worked overnight and they divided up as much of the work as possible to minimize the downtime so you know in some environments you would look at that and say that's a two week move and we moved it on a wednesday and by friday afternoon we were starting to fire the first engine in it so that's more downtime than i want but i also consider the effort by the team to be world class in terms of what they did to minimize how much time we were down josh never has a problem with change it's really easy for him he can always keep the same level of production going no matter what you do exactly that way you start planning a year in advance before you move anything exactly it's kind of an inside joke we have every engine's the same everything's easy for josh he'll deal with anything [Music] well that's your background isn't it that's what you know we try to be do a great job at solving problems and working together as a team and with the team that we have we really couldn't have that mentality to have people be you know they adapt very well and they pitch in and they help out and as soon as we get something going our operators in the shop that have to deal with it they're the first ones to try and help us do a better job that helps make our willingness to change easier too without the team that we have it could be a lot more difficult but people really do care and they want to be a part of help making us change and grow for the better did we did you see production dinos last time you were here yeah we did okay yeah and so if you're watching this video there's a whole other video before this um on my channel for like the main factory tour this is kind of just filling in the gap checking out new stuff so if you haven't seen that go over there and watch those too what other questions do you have uh is there anything new cool in the r d dino room that was that was my favorite part last time we're gonna go back we'll take you through i think qc is relatively similar to what you guys had the last time you're here so we'll go to engineering let those guys show you what we're doing back there and then we'll head on over to rmd all right for people who don't know uh you're the brains behind a lot of the stuff some of the brains frank ramon the lead engineer here in the design side so this is the 302 ford block that we designed yeah i didn't see this before we based it on a ford oem ford block looked at some other aftermarket blocks out there then we also incorporated a bunch of stuff that we wanted in here like we set it up so we can have piston oilers in here like ls blocks have we set it up so the bolts can go all the way down to the the super structure of the block much like what an ls has really done a lot of cool stuff to upgrade and make it stronger and better for us so i'm not a ford guy so i can't remember have do you currently sell your own casting for block now no so this is this is coming out yep this is our next okay here that's gonna be pretty exciting before we used either oem ford blocks or maybe like a dalton block so this will be all ours here just like our small blocks and big blocks are so i would venture to guess that this one will not break in half at 500 horsepower this will not break in half at 500 horsepower guaranteed is this 351 or 302 uh we're doing both both of them how big can the 351 one go that's what i want to know i'm not exactly sure how big that can go all right it's off my head i have to get chris in here and ask i know the 302 can go up to like 363 somewhere yeah please go to 427. that'll be cool i'm going to need one of those next yeah one of the things we're struggling with i think the whole industry is his course in being able to get the small block forward course so it got to a point where it just made sense we could see that coming and it made sense to make the investment and tool up for our own casting which it's going to be great for us yeah if you want to hear him talk a lot about what he does there's a whole video that's factory tour and then there's a whole video just in here with mostly you talking about the r d like design stuff and you had some really freaking fancy cnc parts washer thing here that you're working on yep that's out of the plan now so it's actually working yep that was working we'll take you through it yeah we need to go see that thing all right sounds good when did you put that into operation uh do you remember when that was shawn i don't yeah that's one of more of the manufacturing guys things so i've been involved in that one frank anything else new recently i've been working on i don't know if you've seen that no uh our own ls oil pan new a lot of people been wanting this just another thing that we can use on our engines is that like uh like a swap pan that would work on gma bodies and clear steering racks and all that stuff exactly it's just our own version of it so i see you got all kinds of baffles cast in here i could be wrong but i have not seen those in other oil pans i mean they got this plastic that's not plastic but the piece of bolts on here but these big cast walls i haven't seen that yep that's in there just for people that are doing like auto cross racing or road racing a lot of oil sloshing room for one side of the other it keeps it in that area of the baffles so you don't lose all your oil so that's really cool you sell these components individually too don't you these probably aren't out on our website yet but they probably will be soon okay so you don't have to have the whole engine to get parts that you guys make too exactly we prefer to sell…