Automotive
Fabspeed Motorsport builds high-performance exhausts and air intakes for prestige and racing vehicles. The company’s exhaust systems increase an engines usable power output and deliver a unique sound.
Fabspeed used to create the required pipe by cutting and welding (and grinding and polishing) modular 304L stainless steel component shapes, such as U- and J-bends, fabricated by a subcontractor. This process was flexible, but meant that Fabspeed had to order in bulk, create waste by cutting vehicle-specific exhaust shapes from larger general-purpose components, and perform more assembly steps than ideally necessary.
In 2010, the company decided to invest in its own bender, a machine that could fabricate complex shapes in a single stage, without generating cut-off waste.
Solution
Unison proposed an all-electric, servomotor-controlled Breeze bender capable of bending pipe diameters up to 3 inches with a multi-stack tooling head. Its all-electric, servomotor-powered architecture provides easy and quick machine set-up, as well as the quietness and cleanliness needed for Fabspeed’s studio workshop environment, which deals with the world’s most prestigious vehicles.
New bending programs can be quickly created by using a portable ROMER inspection arm (underneath the vehicle), to reverse-engineer any existing shape. Unison’s machine imports this data and creates the program, and the pipe can then be bent within minutes. The complete process for a new shape can be performed in hours, compared to days before. Once a program is created, shapes can be recalled instantly, allowing exhausts for many popular performance marques to be manufactured in minutes.
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Result
The production process has been radically improved, dramatically reducing stages and time, and reducing material costs (and stock) substantially.
The process also enhances customisation flexibility, a key asset for Fabspeed which on any day can be making exhausts for a popular marque, as well as one-off vintage or racing cars. This flexibility includes an ability to bend to much tighter radii – 1D if required – and rapidly vary bend shapes to improve power, looks, sound etc.
The almost unlimited programmability of the Unison machine allows the company to bend thinner wall tubing to reduce weight, as well as exotic alloy materials, without unacceptable compromises to wall thinning and tube ovality.
- Faster turnaround – from days to hours or minutes Much lower levels of pipe stock
- Process stages reduced dramatically
- Much greater flexibility of bending to meet custom requests
- Right-first-time manufacturing process Significantly lower running costs Greatly reduced scrap