Here is a new product that I've been working on and designing for a long time. It's called a blow off valve, and simply put, it's a pressure relief for turbocharged cars. Here is a bit of the process I've gone through to produce the first prototype.

First lets start out with some of the tools I had to make in order to actually machine this thing.

Various jigs required for drilling/milling/tapping the holes into the top hat, the base, and the weld tube. I don't have a rotary table yet, so I built these instead. Not quite finished in these two pics, quite a few more holes to drill and tap.



I needed an M6-M8 adapter bolt, so I thought I'd try my hand at threading on one the lathe from steel. The cutting tools that I have aren't quite sharp enough for such a fine thread, but it seemed to work alright, until I was ALMOST done with the M6 side then it bent. So after dicking with that for 2 hours it took me all of 10 minutes to machine two bolts, stick 'em together and weld them.


Piston for my testing pressure chamber, along with an aluminum M10x1.25 bolt that I made. Worked awesome, that was the first bolt I've ever made.


I give you my blow off valve testing center. Air compressor pressurizes the 4" chamber, then I can modulate the pressure/vacuum to the top port using the lever and piston. Works alright, but I should have made the variable pressure cylinder like 4x taller, doesn't quite move enough air as it is.

I finally mounted the blow off valve and pressure tested it yesterday, it's pretty awesome. I found a few little leaks here and there, which will really help me hone in on the perfect recipe.


Some of it is quickie flux core welded, some of it isn't.











Here's my first piston design, it was just a quickie to test out clearances and stuff. Turns out that the 60* tapered seat at the bottom doesn't seal boost worth crap. I don't know if the computer is making the angles slightly off or what, I doubt it, but even when pressurized to just 10psi I could feel it leaking. I will be making a new piston that utilizes an 1/8" o-ring down there as the seat, should be awesome. I'll keep screwing with it till it'll hold 100psi without leaking.




Weldy thingies, the big one in the front is steel and the design that I like, the other one is stainless. Big one got welded to the test chamber, I'll put the stainless one on my car soon for real car testing. The notches were created with a belt sander, but eventually I'll set up a vertical rotary table and bust them out on the milling machine... when it's cnc.


Close enough eh?

long time no update!

It's funny because I read other people's blogs and think to myself, man I wish I updated my blog this often! Well there's no excuse, and I'm going to attempt to keep it up to date. I do a lot of really cool work here in the shop that I'd love to share.

Over time I'll post more details, but I'll give you the quickie cliffnotes of life around here since my last post in october. Our short throw shifters have been flying off the shelves since I introduced them last August, it's great! There have been a few small mechanical failures in the design which I have since fixed, no biggie. I stopped using stainless steel for the main shaft because it was extremely expensive and it actually still rusted a bit, so I've started using steel and I picked up a nickel plating kit which does a great job of plating all the parts I need. And the lower pin that goes through the stock shifter fork of the transmission, before I was using stainless steel for that too, but since SS is a bit of a soft material, the needle bearing was actually denting it for some people. Now I'm making them out of steel and hardening them by heating it cherry hot with my oxy/acetylene torch then dunking it in water, then nickel plating it for corrosion resistance. Now they're MUCH tougher!

In march '09 I converted my lathe to CNC, which has been the best tooling decision yet! I'll go more indepth on this conversion at a later date, but basically it's insanely awesome. The accuracy of my work has gone up and repeatability has gone through the roof. I can make the exact same part 100 times over, which really comes in handy when I'm doing big batches. Next up is to convert my milling machine, I might get to do that in July. Here is basically the biblical website for convrting the Grizzly X2 milling machine that I have. http://hossmachine.info/