Edelbrock Aluminum Foundry and Machining Full Tour & Behind the Scenes! (Pouring Molten Metal!)

Made in the USA every single day. Oh my god. We can actually adjust the angle of these cutter heads. We do still hand finish all of the intake man. I love visual demonstrations like this. You call them and someone answers the phone. This is where they're sitting. If you've ever wondered how Edel Brock cylinder heads, intake manifold, valve covers, anything cast aluminum like that gets made. We're about to find out because we are at the Edel Brock foundry in Sanento, California. Let's go on in and check it out. the whole core department. This is where we make cord. We have three different types of sands. We have some some sands that we're curing with gas, some that we're curing with heat. That's called the cold box core process. And these yellow ones are called the hot box process. All these boxes that you see here, these are all hot boxes. Anything you see here are all cured by heat. Some of these you might even recognize from a manifold like that. That's the core box. There's a hot box cast iron to withstand the heat. of your manifold where the carburetor sits. This this is what you would see at the bottom. These are what you call your water jacket cords. This is where your thermostat housing will sit right on top. These are some white sand course. These aren't hot box. These are cured with gas. You can see the different types of sand. So all these pieces of sand are what keep the open space and then it gets busted out and you're left with the final product. Exactly. All these cords will be shaken out down at the end of the line over there. Here we have a cylinder head car assembly intake exhaust and then your water jacket, your slab that'll create the whole deck surface of the cylinder head. We have three molding lines. I walk through this first one. It's all similar. We have big plates that have a pattern on it which takes the representation of the outside of the of the manifold or the head or whatever the hard we're casting. We have two patterns. I don't know if you can see it. There's a manifold in there. He's going to bring down the blast over it. And when he brings down the blast, you're going to make the the top mold. That's how you make the bottom mold. down the line where the gas once the boat's ready. You can see it right here. The force is so that'll keep keep the metal from filling that area and it'll make the shape of the for the black sand which we have clay in it to clay and water to be able to keep the shape of the of the mold. Down there is where we made some holes. Here we have a little this big hot right here. That's our purpose. And it's hot in here. If it's hot in here, when it's in the summer, if it's outside, it's like 90° in here. It'll be like 120°. Okay. If you're a little bit confused on how the actual casting process works or what they're doing with those boxes, is don't worry because this clip right here should explain everything for you. So this is Magmasoft. Magmosoft is a software for simulating how metal goes into the casting and then how that metal will uh solidify afterwards. In this program we can actually fill the casting up. Uh right now we have our gaining uh hidden so you cannot see that but you'll see the casting actually filling up. Uh it's very accurate within a second of our normal fill time. Uh we get to see temperatures as it fills, all the variables as it fills that you cannot see that are coming into the mold when it's, you know, hidden from you from your eye. Um and it saves us time as we run this. We can see anything that might be going wrong in the casting. We can see defects. We can see issues with uh metal not feeding to the area with shrink. all of our defects that we we can call out with the casting. So, this is what's going on inside the black sand. The metal's going in. What's going on? This is aluminum filling up your sand or filling up the empty cavity within your sand mold and around your cores. And this is velocity. So, this is the speed that it's coming in. And so, if you have too much velocity, you can get some really nasty looking metal, especially when you cut it and machine into it. casting itself might look good, but once you cut it and machine it, it will not. That's cool. You can see the EGR crossover filling out. Yep. And then it's got the plug and it poops out the top and goes down the line. Exactly. If you think this stuff is cool, make sure you hit the subscribe button and check out the channel for other factory tours where we show you how to make all kinds of awesome stuff just like this. We've watched this several times and I just got to keep doing it cuz it's so cool. I'm sure everybody who works here is over it by now, but the novelty is still there for me. I like whenever it pops up out the holes and it's all super shiny. Yeah. Oh, that's so satisfying. Danger hot metal area with metal melted all over it. Doesn't get any better than that. Do you ever get tired of watching this stuff? No, we'll just switch to another part. Get tired. All of our moldy crap. We test it like two or three times a day. We checkinity, clay content, moisture levels. We check everything. This might be one of the coolest places we have ever been in. This is see molten metal get poured into something. All right. Wow. Here you see our gate. This is how it all starts. So this is the raw metal right here. That's the raw metal. We have a gate and back here we have some lbs of sand. Our sand, our green sand line can hold 100 tons of sand in it. But on the boundary down belated the sand. You can't see it, but it's circated as we go. So where do these get loaded into the into there to get melted? How does that work? You put open that. You drop the bricks in there. You drop the ingots in there. It's already going to be heated. It's going to melt it all up. What they're going over there is they're rubbing some of our crap which is all the stuff that you don't get on your gas. No matter if we have any parts that you don't need that they're just for the dynamic of the mold filling to create the structure that we need. So that gets already melted in there. And all these cans here already been poured. These are getting cooled down. As they cool down, they're going to travel to the end of the line where they get busted out of the out of the plastic. We get actual on the other side. White one. That's the other type of sand that we have to make the other cores. Those are cured with gas. So you pour it in, you throw it into a box, you fill it up with gas, and it comes out already from inside there. This is where the shake out process of the of the casting starts. We heat up the cores again. That way makes it pretty easy to shake them out. You can see like all these small pieces, that's all of a sudden get stuffed off. So when they still got the cores in them, they go in there to get to get weight shaken out. Where do they get shaken out at? Yeah, they get baked out over there. Then they get shaken out on the outside. We have a big vibrator that'll shake out all the sand right out of it. So that's a big oven. That's a big oven. Heats it up, gets dissolved again, and then we send it over there. Vibrate the sand right out of it. And here they're deburring all the parts. Get any other excess. There's always splash or anything on any casting. They get cleaned up. They look like near finished. We still have a a final surface finish process that we do after. Here we have some small block Chevy uh EFI manifolds right here. Walk around the boundary. was always bad. So these are the cold box ones. Yeah. So this these are plastic. These are not hot. These are careless with gas. You can see this is for that Pro X or EFI manifold. You just know you can kind of make the shape of it. Yeah. Take the inside of the He's going to open the furnace so we can see what's in there. This where our metal is. That's where it gets heated up. You can get a big bath of hot muly metal. We'll throw some of our scrap stuff. We'll blow it in there. Get it all melted up. Also, this is where they all the scrap down. Yep. Okay. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Man, this is the closest thing I've ever experienced to a volcano. My god. Getting hotter. Hot. Yeah, it's hot. Is that hot enough for you? Yeah, it feels good, man. So you went to college for this stuff? I did mechanical engineering right out of college. Worked at a different place, but cars was always what I really liked. I was, "All right, let's go to air rock." All the raw sand that'll eventually get turned into cores. Very of these sacks 3,000 lb. Wow. You can see the map. Those are some strong shells. What are they doing right here? So, not only do we have sound capabilities of molding, but we have permanent molds. These are big cast iron molds that'll make you the same part every time. So, this cast iron, it's nice and cold right now. If it was running, it would be super duper hot. Over there, we have our metal bath and our robot arm that'll pour it in here. As you can see, that's our pouring cup that'll catch it. It'll close up. It'll load up the core and it'll spin it up. Robot will come pick it back up, send it down the cooling line over there. Cassie said, you can see the core sticking out. Does that metal stay molten all the time? No. They turn it off at night or do they run the metal? Yeah, it'll stay hot all the time. Probably take like a few couple hours. You lose a lot of production time. You try to cool it. They heat it back up after it's cool. So, it stays on third. Does this run all the time or does they leave at night? There's two ships. So, the second step will come and run it. These would be what you consider a finished casting. They've already been blasted and everything and they're ready to be wrapped up and sent to one of our We have like three machine shops here. We have a machine shop in Olive Branch. They're ready to machine it down for you. Ah, so this finish is made in that machine. So, when they come out, they'll come out nice and dirty or uneven surface finish. This will get it all fluid and make it look nice. And those are what go to olive branch to get finished machine. So from prototype to functional casting now versus 30 years ago before you had this. Does it how much R&D time does actually cut out of that compared to before this was a thing? I'd say hundreds of hours it can. Yeah. Potentially depending on how complex the casting is. Some are easier than others. a a complex manifold, you've you might have lost days worth of time that you ran on the line compared to running in something like this and then being right first time or maybe only making one or two sample runs uh to have a really good solid part. Have you been doing this stuff longer than this was available to you? Yes. Um available to us, we've had this, let's say, going on probably eight years, nine years. I've been here uh going over 13 years uh that I've been using this software or not using the software but with the uh company and then using the software. So uh it's been a big change. It's been a big help. Um we're able to even dig down in and find things that are wrong with the casting um that we didn't know until it actually got out and was machined. let's say downstream uh fully machined fully and they found this weakness inside or found an issue inside that now we can see those beforehand right before there's an actual even failure out outward right we can see that and address it. Wow. So you do all the the prototype designing and testing right here and it comes out as a finished product probably 300 ft over there. That's right. All in the same spot. That's right. Wow. You don't find that very many places. Yeah. So here's one of the results that we have. We call it soundness and soundness is you know how solid is the actual casting how how solid is the material the metal right so in this it's showing us a result that in some of these areas we are not quite sound right there might be pockets or voids and we can cut into that see what that pocket or void looks like now all castings you know have a paracity to them we have paracity levels that are called out and what we're trying to do is make sure that if there is there will it affect ffect the operation of the casting? Will it affect the appearance of the casting? Um, and obviously keep it at a minimum no matter where it's at. And so this shows you that the likelihood of the area there. You see that there's about uh only 10% sound and then it sound grows out. So the more it goes up the scale, the more solid the part is. So everything white is 100% solid. There's no issues there. Starts in the yellow getting a little less and less. Right? So visually what that could look like if you cut that casting is a small speck right inside. So that whole thing could just be a speck. Just a speck. And it's just showing us that level of severity how it would come into that speck and and be there, right? Wow. Odds are if you did see this in the casting, it would just be a small little dip that would be in the casting. It wouldn't be anything visual that you would see and it's not there. And again, we do this is one of our high running castings that we make. And so, yes, you don't see that. It's not it's not really there, but it shows you that there's that tendency there. So, you want to pay attention to it and make sure if you can that you address it. So, something real little like these, you would never it doesn't even mean anything in the final product, right? Unless on these, since this is your flange that's mounting to your uh to the head, right? So, if you cut into that and it was actually in that flange right up against the surface, then that could be a defect that would cause you not to have a seal, not to have an issue. you know, to have an issue there around that ceiling edge. So, we would definitely look into that. But, as you see, these are actually down in the runner sides of it. So, this is basically a a simulated data log of the entire pore. That's right. Right. Huh. Gives you the views that we used to have to take the casting, not only sample the casting, but then uh finish the casting and cut it up and sometimes machine those areas because even when you cut it with a saw, you can't see the defect. It's so small. So then you machine it to make it a really nice shiny surface that you can see that defect in. Right. But now we can see it broad daylight, you know, really highlighted in a program like this. That's freaking cool. I love this stuff. So what is this thing here? This is actually core plugs. It represents the cores that would make the internal passages of a manifold. And on this one, it's an assembly. This this is exactly how the cores would be made. This is actually one core that can fit both sides. So, it's a single core that's just made twice. And then this is the central core. And this is actually the old core design. So, in striving for efficiency and improvements, we've remade this core to where now it's made in a box with and it comes out as all one piece. We do not have to do assembly. We don't have to do alignments on anything. It's just comes out as one piece and we're able to put that directly into the into the mold. So these these represent the compressed sand that goes in there, right? The cores. Yes. The core box is the internal passages. So whether it be like what you've seen already, the hot box or a cold set sand that this would be made. Originally this was made in what we call our hot boxes, right? And a shell core sand. And now it's made in the ISO sand. That's that cold set white sand that you see. Okay. So, back in the before it was one piece, people had to take all these individual pieces and like glue them together. Correct. That's it. They use these jigs uh to kind of put them in there and align them and make sure everything is nice and set well and assembled with glue uh paste to get rid of the parting lines that they would have and make it as nice and neat as possible. So that we got a nice clean casting and nice clean features. And if you've seen our John Callie's video where he mentions core shift being the reason for why someone's heads were cheated up higher than they were, core shift is when someone did not orient these correctly and they're just a little bit off. That is right. The finished product is, you know, maybe it's glued together like that and then that variance is in there different from what it's actually supposed to be. That's correct. So, if you didn't know what a core shift is, that might help you understand it a little bit better, right? And obviously, it's a lot uh easier to have a core shift and and something that's an assembly like this, right? Um it when we make it as a one piece, can't really have core shift because it's exactly one piece. It's a one piece drop, right? So, core shift isn't even really a something that you have to worry about anymore. Um, no, we still have cores that are made like this. It depends on complexity, right? So, we do still have a lot of assemblies. Um, but we're trying to eliminate it more and more as we uh find new and unique ways to make this core design. Okay, that's really cool. I love visual demonstrations like this. So, after the castings are finished at the facility in California, they get shipped to Olive Branch, Mississippi, where basically everything else happens. So, we're about to go in there with Mark here. Yep. He's going to show us how it's done. Yeah. In the back of this building is where we do all the machining and final uh assembly of everything and then it gets shipped out to the customer from there. You guys just moved into here recently, didn't you? Yeah. So, we've been in this location for about seven or eight years, but the sales team and everything like that just started uh in here in uh May, April, May basically is when we moved into this location. So, um the machining and everything like that's been in here for about a year and a half somewhere in that area. So, um, but yeah, this is, uh, it's quiet up here, but once we get further back here, we're going to make a lot more noise. That's for sure. The comp factory in Memphis that we just filmed is going to get moved here. Yes. In the near future. Yeah, absolutely. We're working on plans to do that right now. The first phase of that move will actually be to move some of the engineering team here. Um, they'll actually go upstairs. We're just starting the renovation downstairs here in our media room which is kind of over in the far corner there. Uh where the media marketing team is going to move down there, put the engineering team upstairs and and our R&D center will actually be moved into the back of this building. That's kind of phase one of this next move. And then probably within the calendar year, I would suspect they're going to start working on the on all the details to to try and move the cam shop over here as well. How big is this place? About 300,000 square ft is what this building location is. Wow, it's enormous. So, yeah, lots of lots of shelves, lots of parts. Um, you know, the way the warehouse kind of works, all of our bulk goods come in on this side. All the finished goods are on this side. So, there's flow through the building this way. Um, so anything that's in bulk uh that we manufacture at another facility or something like that comes in packaging station, which we'll walk up here and see that in just a few minutes. What did this place used to be before you guys moved in here? This place was a a very very large printing um operation that actually did all the stuff for like the holiday and hotels and there therefore actually had some like almost hotel room type stuff up front in where the offices are now where people actually slept and stayed sometimes really. Um but yeah, basically huge huge printing facility where they printed all the promotional products and everything like that for uh for some holidays hotel stuff. So, wasn't there…