3D Printed Aluminum Intake Manifold - Laser Melting Process

a few years ago someone had told me that this intake manifold is 3d printed I don't know if I believe them it really looks like a casted piece the guys that made it were nice enough to let us film the whole process and I'm gonna share that with you guys now let's check it out the place that did the printing for us is called MIMO Technic in Carson California inside this office building is this crazy printer called an S cell m500 they actually have a couple of them one set up for aluminum like what we used and another one set up for inconel alloys high-temperature nickel that they use for exhaust manifold collectors headers and other automotive parts and aerospace stuff as well we already had our intake manifold CAD designed so all the computer-aided design was done and we gave that solid model over to the MIMO Technic guys they took our CAD model and then programmed the support and then the print strategy for the machine the way the machine works is it uses really small powder aluminum so the manifold is gonna be made out of this powder and way it works is it lays down a two thousandths of an inch layer of this aluminum powder that's point zero zero two then laser welds the first layer of powder to the aluminum plate that's how they get the material to stick initially then the machine comes back and lays down another mm thick layer of material so that's half the thickness of a human hair then the laser turns on again and welds it in all of the locations where the intake manifold is going to exist and it does it layer by layer so cross section by cross section so it keeps putting down a layer of the powder then laser welding it until you have an entire part just the plenum for the intake the larger round piece for the intake manifold was six thousand nine hundred ninety one layers and the print time took 51 hours yeah over two days of printing to get the one piece once the print is done it's actually submersed in all of the powder so then you have to get the part out of the powder so you transfer the big box with the part and all the powder in it over to the unpacking station you don't want to breathe that powder because it's so small it's not good for you so typically they'll wear respirators they do it in this unpacking station with gloves and everything and a vacuum until you have just the part left and then they recycle the leftover powder for future parts so after a prints each layer the platform goes down that mm of an inch until the whole box is filled with your part and the powder in the unpacking station it goes the other way the play we'll come up and then start exposing the part and you can see all the powder falling off of it and then after a few hours of dusting the whole part off and vacuuming everything up then you've got your part left and it's safe to handle but it's not ready to be used yet because it's actually welded with all of the support that's what you see are those like what looks like cascades of aluminum coming down the parts actually have to be cut off of the plate because they're welded on right now but once it's cut off then it's actually relatively straightforward to clean it up and get it ready to be welded together the support breaks off relatively easy with Justin pliers and then goes and gets recycled because the intake manifold is so large and the envelope of the printer is only so big we actually had to print it in four different pieces and we're gonna eventually weld them all together but before we welded it together we wanted to make sure all of the surfaces were totally smooth that way they have a good seal on the engine for the intake manifold so we brought it over to the shop and fly cut the aluminum so we had a nice smooth surface once we had a machine we brought it back over to miimo Technic where we bolted it to an aluminum plate and that aluminum plate allowed Chris to weld it without it warping once the whole intake manifold was welded together we had a couple more features that had to be drilled and because these are precision holes that need to have a specific surface finish for O rings for the fuel injectors we again did that on our mill at the shop we actually have a special drill bit that has the profile of the fuel injectors that we're gonna use all in one drill operation so even though there's a couple of steps in it this drill bit has all of those features built in and it's much quicker you can just drill six holes and the injectors are ready to install because it's such an awkward piece it would've been hard and taking a lot of time to fixture it to be machined so what we did is we 3d printed a drill guide we and we put these steel inserts into the 3d printed part that way when we drilled the holes before we tapped it they would be straight because it's really hard sometimes to drill holes straight and then we also have this tap guide that way the bolt can bolt in straight we then put our injector dynamics 2000cc injectors into the fuel row and bolted it all together the factory engine in this car only has direct injection which is a really good system but for the horsepower we plan to make we needed to run six additional injectors and that's one of the reasons why we built this intake manifold and the reason we 3d printed it was because we needed so quickly the 3d printing was something definitely expensive but well worth it because of the time savings and there you have it all done ready to get bolted on the engine this intake manifold is part of a bigger project where we're trying to take this 2020 super engine and make a thousand horsepower with it we've got a few other videos where we do a full teardown and then we show all the parts that we're changing in it and also the full assembly of the engine I'll link to those videos in the description down below if you enjoy the video please hit the like button if you want to see more please consider subscribing see you in the next video thank you

Channel: PapadakisRacing

Views: 951,534

Rating: 4.9513583 out of 5

Keywords: build, stephan, papadakis, racing, 2jz-gte, 2jzgte, engine, building, dial, motor, 1jz, supra, toyota, jz80, a90, a80, a70, 3jz, b58, b58b, b58m30, b58b30, vanos, bmw, camshaft, cam, motorsports, 2020, 2021, 2019, teardown, technology, steph, builder, 2jz, intake, intake manifold, 3d print, 3d, rapid, prototype, laser, melting, process, lmp, mimo tecknik, print metal, slm, slm solutions, plenum, maker, additive manufacturing, metal, powder

Id: IUp3oCGZOzk

Length: 4min 54sec (294 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Although, at $800/lb for parts, it seems like more of a novelty than a practical option. I can't wait for prices to come down for this kind of technology. I already have several 3D printed plastic parts on my cars and having the ability to do metal would be awesome

[u/jacky4566]

Why are they using supports with sls printing? Doesn't the Powder support the product as it prints?