We were thrown a HUGE curve ball this past week. We have a CNC tube bender and we needed some 3/4 tooling to make the body tubes for our ride. The supplier kept putting us off and putting us off and putting us off... Finally, I told Sandwich to tell the guy either it showed up this week or we were going to make it ourselves. He laughed and said it was too complicated for us to make and that it would take us way longer than the 5 extra weeks he was quoting us...
Telling me I can't do something is a "no-no" around here. Waiting on this car is NOT an option.
Truthfully, the part is pretty hard as the tolerances are very tight. To complicate matters further, 17-4 SHRINKS in heat treat, so you have to make the part over sized on the bearing surfaces and then "guess (educated guess from our long experience with 17-4). Sandwich was busy so it fell to me to baby sit the part. It took 3 passes to hit the tolerance. As you can imagine, it makes you sweat when you are moving the lathe wear offsets by 0.0005" at a time to make sure you hit it just right.
The bending tool posed a particular problem as the radius we needed is actually smaller than the axle shaft the bending dies normally sit on. Solution? Cut the die groove right into the axle!
Everyone told us we couldn't do it (I hate it when people say that; I even told my guys in Poland I was going to fire the next worker who told me "niemozliwe" (not possible).
So, here is is the tool, 3 DAYS later. Engineered, lathed, milled, ready for heat treat.
