Let's assume you wanted to have someone cast a custom engine block or cylinder head for you and then have someone else do the final machining. Who would you go to for those?
Let's assume you wanted to have someone cast a custom engine block or cylinder head for you and then have someone else do the final machining. Who would you go to for those?
Machining is the easy part ... casting depends on what kind of block we are talking about. Most likely you need to look at Asia.
Is it based on an existing block design or you want to design something from scratch?
I hear Pro Line makes their blocks, if an Lsx is what your looking at, in Canton Ga. they may could make your part. Dart Ind. also
I have a little knowledge on this since this is basically what I used to do for a living and now I design foundry equipment for cleaning castings.
Dart blocks and iron heads (Iron Eagles, etc) are cast by Motor Castings here in sunny Milwaukee, WI. They are also cast at Dalton Foundry in Warsaw, Indiana.
I also work with Supreme Castings here in Milwaukee, they make a lot of small run parts like intakes, heads, etc all aluminum. They make some Olds stuff, some flathead stuff, some stuff for antique tractors.
The hardest part for making a casting is getting the tooling. Once the tooling is made and qualified and some quality expectations are set, materials determined, etc, lots of shops could make the actual castings.
As far as the tooling, you would need a pattern and core boxes. In order of lowest cost to highest cost, These can either be designed by you, or you can take a CAD file of the part you want and have a shop make the pattern and core boxes, or you can drop off a part you want copied/modified at a foundry or pattern shop and have them make all the CAD and the tooling. Of course, if you design the part in CAD, its yours. If the foundry or pattern shop designs the part, they will want ownership of it unless you bought the engineering time from them as well which would need to be discussed at time of quote.
There are also some other gotchas as well. The process that works best for GM to make 500,000 Trailblazer engines probably does not make economic sense for a guy who wants to make 100 intake manifolds. The foundry will have their preferred supplier of patterns, and not all foundries can make the same size of part or finish it to the same level. Some guys can just get it in metal, cut the gating off, and blast it clean. Other guys can machine you a complete and finished part ready to install.
For a onesy twosy block or head, probably makes more sense to make in billet. The tooling is big big money. Ballpark homeboy hookup pricing on some flathead V8 head tooling would be 6-10k assuming you had CAD data of the part you want. That would get you one head, if you want an opposite hand it would be that much again. V8 engine block would be 5-10x that easily.
If you want to talk more on the subject or get in touch with a potential supplier let me know.
I probably should have mentioned, I'm assuming a "production run" of less than a dozen... But if the CAD design exists then maybe that doesn't matter so much.
93gsxturbo said:I have a little knowledge on this since this is basically what I used to do for a living and now I design foundry equipment for cleaning castings.
Dart blocks and iron heads (Iron Eagles, etc) are cast by Motor Castings here in sunny Milwaukee, WI. They are also cast at Dalton Foundry in Warsaw, Indiana.
I also work with Supreme Castings here in Milwaukee, they make a lot of small run parts like intakes, heads, etc all aluminum. They make some Olds stuff, some flathead stuff, some stuff for antique tractors.
The hardest part for making a casting is getting the tooling. Once the tooling is made and qualified and some quality expectations are set, materials determined, etc, lots of shops could make the actual castings.
As far as the tooling, you would need a pattern and core boxes. In order of lowest cost to highest cost, These can either be designed by you, or you can take a CAD file of the part you want and have a shop make the pattern and core boxes, or you can drop off a part you want copied/modified at a foundry or pattern shop and have them make all the CAD and the tooling. Of course, if you design the part in CAD, its yours. If the foundry or pattern shop designs the part, they will want ownership of it unless you bought the engineering time from them as well which would need to be discussed at time of quote.
There are also some other gotchas as well. The process that works best for GM to make 500,000 Trailblazer engines probably does not make economic sense for a guy who wants to make 100 intake manifolds. The foundry will have their preferred supplier of patterns, and not all foundries can make the same size of part or finish it to the same level. Some guys can just get it in metal, cut the gating off, and blast it clean. Other guys can machine you a complete and finished part ready to install.
For a onesy twosy block or head, probably makes more sense to make in billet. The tooling is big big money. Ballpark homeboy hookup pricing on some flathead V8 head tooling would be 6-10k assuming you had CAD data of the part you want. That would get you one head, if you want an opposite hand it would be that much again. V8 engine block would be 5-10x that easily.
If you want to talk more on the subject or get in touch with a potential supplier let me know.
That’s very nice information. I wish I’d known earlier. Thank you.
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