Million Dollar Skunksworks Kirkham

[David Kirkham]

Here is the die that actually goes on top of the axle I just showed you. This die is for the "roll bending" or "push bending" of the 3/4 body tubes. Roll bending is really cool. If you have never seen it, you will not believe it. When we get it up and running, I will post a YouTube of it. We made this out of 4340 and man is it a pig to machine.

[David Kirkham]

Here is another shot of one of our lathes. It is a pretty big HL-30. We can spin around 30 inches on it I think--never had a reason to try something that big, however. We use big lathes because you have to have the power to hog on the nasty materials we use like 4340 and 17-4 stainless. It is a 30 horsepower lathe. For reference, home lathes are 1-5 hp. Most manual lathes in machine shops are 2-5 hp. Of course, there are lathes out there to turn battle ship barrels...who knows how many hp they have!

[David Kirkham]

Last week we started the exhaust nightmare. The customer wants under-car exhaust and there is NO ROOM in the inn. We had to pull out every trick in the book. Here you can see #4 is still being trial fitted to the head. You can still see a gap in fitting of the flange to the tube. FE heads have a really dumb (hey, they didn't know any better back then) rectangular exhaust port. It makes putting round tubes in square holes really fun! Incidentally, that is one of the HUGE reasons why FE headers are so expensive.

[David Kirkham]

Here you can sort of see the difficulty we were faced with in the space department. You are looking through the passenger's foot box.

[David Kirkham]

Here is another shot of the exhaust.

[David Kirkham]

[David Kirkham]

This is a pic of the collector we are going to use. As you can see, the exhaust is made completely from 304 stainless. It really polishes up quite nicely.