Anyone interested in Cobra adapter brackets

[Halon]

Big fat Jim?

[Speedfreak]

Yup. Figured I could start with him, then get a couple second opinions.

[Halon]

Yeah he's a smart dude.

[s1ngletracker]

I welcome all opinions! I'm also an engineer (however not a materials expert) and as I'm well acquainted with, you can manufacture anything, use just about any material, attain any tolerance, etc... but everything has a cost.

7075 will nearly triple the material costs, and more exotic alloys will be even more. I'd make and sell them for $120 for a set out of 7075 with current design.
If anyone has connections to get cheap 7075, that would be awesome!

I'm confident I can work something out with 6061-T6 but I need to run a few more simulations.

The struggle at the moment is that i'm not sure what type of temps this part will receive. I am designing this to sustain track/racing conditions. I'm sure it would be completely fine on the street with like a 4x safety factor. I'm currently running a simulation that peaks at about 400F. That cuts the yield strength by about 75%. I have measured race car temps that peak to 1200+F at the caliper, so this adapter could possibly be experiencing a lot of heat.

I think I might have a few made and get some running temp measurements at DCTC before committing to a big production run. I can make some extras for people, with the understanding that it is not yet proven.

[Halon]

This guy Jim, he's pretty hard core. He's not just you're standard mechanical engineer, his specific area of expertise is material and welding, that's all he does. It's funny how real professional welding makes anything any of us (or even shops) do look like childs play. The rest of us can sit here and oogle over the prettiest looking manifold made by say Full Race. Where he'll take a look at it, their material choices, and their process and completely rip it apart like it's garbage.

Long story short, if Momin gets input from him I'd listen :)

[s1ngletracker]

Ain't seen nothing till you've seen an E-Beam or projection weld! :D We do welds that hold up to about 10,000 psi here.

I look forward to hearing his input!

[Halon]

How about I-STIR? :)

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[s1ngletracker]

Yes! another cool form of welding, I have a friend who works at PaR in that department (who bought the friction stir welding technology from MTS)

[Halon]

Who is it? That's where I work, well used to work until Westinghouse bought out the nuclear side of PaR and they renamed us PaR Nuclear...

[Speedfreak]

Short version of what he said (he said a lot), was no aluminum. Basically through the heat cycles and temp range, it'll loose it's properties and is at risk of failure.

He mentioned aluminum calipers can work due to them being cast(explained the structure of the metal etc.. went beyond what I needed to know :P) and specific alloys being used/chosen combined with cooling techniques employed in car design etc.

Anyways, his first choice was Inconel.. But I said our budgets won't allow it :P

He then said, just choose a common SS and it'll work.


Like Halon mentioned, welding is a whole new world after being directly involved in it for about a year. Not machine welding, human welding. There is a ridiculous other world of AWS/ASME codes/practices etc that need to be strictly followed in the Nuclear world.