Motorsports Manufacturing
Chasing the Magic Bullet Te Stewart-Haas manufacturing center supports three
NASCAR teams, each with 15 cars. Tere are three engineer- ing groups designing parts for these cars. One stays primarily at the track making modifications to part designs that need to be installed in time to perform in next week’s race. Tis does not mean that the shop will be making 45 of the same part for each of the cars because each racing team may have different ideas about the modifications that they would like to make before the next race.
factured with the shop’s eight Haas three- and five-axis mills and their four Haas lathes. Te shop team manufactures a wide range of modified parts for chassis, suspension, body, brakes, electrical, EFI and driver controls. Engineers leave their part designs on the server and Har-
ris will evaluate the requirements and then assign Mastercam programming either to himself or one of the two program- mers who work with him. All the part designs are kept on the server where any programmer can retrieve them and import them into Mastercam. When several versions of
“We don’t have to wait until race day to get feedback on how we are doing.”
Brad Harris, shop manager for Stewart-Haas Racing, said,
“Our engineers are continually looking for the Magic Bullet, a design modification that will give our team a competitive advantage. Tese nuances are so important that we only share them with others on the team on a need-to-know basis. “We don’t have to wait until race day to get feedback on
how we are doing. We have a seven-post hydraulic track simulator that we can use to measure and analyze anything on the car, along with a 180-mph full-scale rolling-road wind tunnel. Tese things allow us to capture and analyze test data and create a package that allows the car to go as fast as we can make it within the rules. Of course, many other teams are do- ing exactly the same thing.” Tere are literally hundreds of adjustments that are made on these cars every week and most require new parts manu-
the same part are required that week, they are treated as a part family within Mastercam to eliminate the extra work involved in making separate CAM programs for each.
Dynamic Productivity As with all things racing, speed is of the essence in the shop
and the shop team is continually working to standardize and improve its procedures to assure the fastest possible turn- around for new part designs. Four people work in the shop. Three, including Harris,
write CNC part manufacturing programs and they also operate the machines. Generally there is one operator for every three machines running at a given time. The trick is to keep them operating at high cycles, essentially untended so that a greater portion of their time can be devoted to writing programs for the next round of parts. There are a number of strategies that help Harris and his team meet these objectives: Eliminating Mistakes—“We want to eliminate mistakes,”
Harris said, “because that is where you really can lose a lot of time.” Mistakes are eliminated by using Mastercam’s simula- tion features to verify clearances and material removal, par- ticularly for first pieces. Tis is particularly important for 3+2 machining where the tool and holder may be approaching the part from a number of different orientations. “With Verify,” Harris said, “you can basically see what you
are going to get on the computer screen so when you go out to the machine you know what to expect. You can see if there are going to be clearance issues with the tool, holder, and fixtures or whether or not the tool is going to gouge, and then correct those things in advance.” Consolidating Part Information—Te shop team has
Waterline Dynamic Toolpath for semifinishing and finishing uses a set of constant Z slices to provide balanced material removal all the way around the part.
82 Motorized Vehicle Manufacturing
made it one of its goals to make sure all the information needed for manufacturing a given part is entered into the CAD program’s file. Tis means that any member of the team can pull a part program off the server without having to hunt for additional information regarding tools, setups, etc.
Photo courtesy CNC Software Inc.
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