BluePrint Engines Factory Full Tour & Behind The Scenes: How Does a Crate Engine Get Made?

we've switched rolls i'm gonna try to put this together [Applause] [Music] we'll have you put on safety glasses it's really deceptive how big this building is so we'll start talking about blocks so our blocks are made in the usa they're they're cast in the midwest they come to us we get them the only thing that's really done to them is when they come out of of the foundry there's some raised metal and stuff on there so they go through and remove those so when we load them inside of the machines it doesn't throw off the machining or make it so it can't be loaded from there each one of these machines performs a different function so if you look at how a block starts when it goes in every step along the way we're just breaking up the machining into small bite-sized pieces so it's kind of like having an elephant one bite at a time that's how we machine a block so when we go in you can see that we'll start out and we'll do the end that will do the bell housing the timing cover a lot of the starting of the bolt holes and things of that nature and as you go through along the way you can see different steps have been completed so this one the lifter bores aren't done the deck isn't finished yet the oil galleys don't look like they're completely done yet so you can see the transformation from that casting and see how it's starting to look like a machine block when they come out and they're finished this is after that first operation you can see that a lot of it is still in place our second operation does a lot of rough machining so it goes through and just removes a bunch of material and then when it gets down to the end after we've got a lot of the main machining done we put on the mains you can feel that there it's not fully machined and smoothed yet oh yeah so what that what will happen is one of the coming operations they'll actually size that for the crankshaft and then after that's all done it comes out and it's going to go through our line home machine i'm going to grab somebody and show you how we do this cncs do a great job of holding very tight tolerances for us and once they come out the last step is to finish the main journal and so one of the things that we do is there'll be a little bit of coolant you've got these stones that are designed to go in and really dial in the main journal for the crankshaft so chad is going to show you how the machine operates and you'll see a theme from what what this with david you know if you look at this this machine was designed and manufactured by our team so david who explained the block washer also took the lead on this one so you'll notice the simplification from what you usually see in a line holding you tell them about the curtain yeah this is the light curtain so there's a beam that goes back and forth between these two bars and if somebody accidentally puts their hand in it or their shirt or something it'll shut the machine down right away as a safeguard like a fancy garage door it's exactly the same concept [Music] all those sprayers in there are perfectly pointed that's so cool will this just run through here once or do you make multiple passes wow one pass those are very specific stones that were designed for this application once it goes through and does that pass it's sized and ready to go um that won't get touched again until we start installing bearings and it'll go through a wash tank but that micro sizer takes it to the point where it's ready for the the main journal bearings to be installed that's crazy so it goes from the raw bumped out like unfinished state to ready to rock in one pass just like that and this is a pretty cool shot when you look at the number of blocks each one of these different colored sheets of paper is sticking out of it tells us it's for a different engine application so you think about the block itself there will be provisions for fuel pumps yeah where you can see it's got the fuel pump and mechanical fuel pump holes machined in it there will be other ones over here you can see that it's not machined in there and then we have a block where we've got a piston oiler in it and so those those other ones over there there's an actual hole where you can put a manifold in there and put oil on the pistons and turbo applications now if you feel you remember that step you felt on the other side yeah that steps completely gone yeah that's like done done you can't feel it at all exactly these are all v8 small block chevy um kind of your 350 to 383 application for our product line that's what you see the space is in the plant it's for capital expansion where we can buy new equipment put it in place to do more and more of our own blocks is our small blocks like your most volume popular product line both from the industrial side and also on the performance side that's where most of our volume is at right now after they are lined up in the field of dreams here where do they go after that so when these guys are done they'll go right over to the cylinder hone so in the cylinder hole this this mower for the piston is about 98 complete over there we use some honing stones and we can go over and take a look at that when they do that you're really doing two things you're making sure you get a good cross hatch inside the cylinder and a good placo finish what's exceptional so this area here is all being cleared out from all right let's think of it now throwing blocks around so this is the cylinder hole you can see there's a there's a tool head in there that's rotating and moving up and down and you can see what it's doing here inside of the machine so each block has its own uh targets that they have to hit when they machine and this is the machine that makes sure that that's how they get finished so you can take into account you can put in the amount of stock you need to remove you can make sure that you remove or have the right amount of paper inside of the cylinder so when this is finished we know that it's ready for pistons to be installed what's the actual transportation process from the block from that thing to over here yeah so they will actually grab the block by either the main journal or certain holes here and they can pick it up and transport it and put it inside the machine so once the blocks come in on the pallet the rest of the way it gets lifted and brought all the way down the line from there it gets put on this table so this is that manual walk we saw the robotic washer before so you can see there are two tanks for it so again we're able to combine and minimize the footprint that it takes which allows us to put more equipment in the plant on this side you've got a really hot wash that gets everything loosened up from the process and on the other side you're doing a brush wash and getting the rust for a bit in the bottom so they don't rust as they go through this is where everything comes together to finish that block it won't be machined after this step so what this does is it takes a block that's already been so if we buy one that we didn't see in c machine here we have to go in and boom out sometimes if you have a block that's a four inch bore and you want to go to a four inch 40 you do that in that machine the other thing that you're doing in that machine is you're doing the final pass on the deck is this the original version of what that is though you can see it's a very manual process for the operator they go through they remove stock and then they inspect each one of those journals to make sure that it's right if if one size you know if you think about wear and tear from an older uh vintage casting the caps in the journals man it may have worn a little bit differently so this helps make sure that you true up each one individually and that's what he's checking right now with his gauge after an engine is washed we put in the camshaft and the cam bearings it goes through the paint booth we've got a couple of different options you can see we've got like a raw ls block which people really like that option we've got the old spool uh chevy orange as an option and then for some of our ford engines we've got a ford blue that we paint the engines and really what it allows um customers to do if they have a preference they can they can paint the block whatever color they want otherwise they can just take our base option how does the paint booth work i want to see that it's a very manual process we'll go around them this place is intense i'm just a sponge right now now this block is prepped to be painted so you can see how we put plugs and magnets we blocked that stuff off so you don't get any paint inside there it's just like you're used to seeing somebody painting it by hand they'll go through and they'll make sure that they get all the angles and rotate it they'll flip it up so we can paint the bell housing and it gets a really nice finish coming out of the booth it's simple and it's effective and it really works for what we're trying to do just a magnet this is like a refrigerator magnet exactly that's so cool you got some stuff that's like super refined cutting edge technology and then magnets and paint booths yeah and if you think about it like that's just a different size soft plug we're willing to invest but we want our investment to go where it adds the most value for our customers investing in cnc equipment and a really tight tolerance capable equipment is really important for us for us whether you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sophisticated paint booth or you use some magnets and have somebody do it by hand the quality ends up being the same in the end so you know as our volume goes up the capital investment to put an automated booth in might make a lot more sense for what we're producing today having somebody do it by hand still works for us very well now you can see like this is for like a to be like for a ford you can see how it's blue the water pump surface on a ford is different than a water pump surface on a small block chevy and the finished ones roll over there yeah we've got we've we're in the process because of our volume of splitting up the line so this line right here is is a is a lower volume high mix line so this line would run this is a big block chevy this is a big block chevy that's a 509 we would run our 632s 572s down this line eventually our ls's will run down this line and you can see everywhere you see a blue station the operators have built their own workstation for use inside of the line so we give them the ability to set up their workstation in a way that means more to them instead of me saying this is how your station is going to be they get the chance to go through and set that up so this is a new line that's in development for us um where we'll be installing technology like a head robot which we're going to see here in a little bit things of that nature but on this line an operator would do the crank the timing the lifters you know they're going to do multiple steps in one so they have to do more steps when we get to the main assembly line you'll see the build is broke down into like 15 or 20 minute chunks where it's crank install timing install rear seal install piston install oil pan install and it's broke up so we we develop our assembly line based off of what volume we need to hit for the day so we look at the tact time which you think about a drum beat you think about you need to hit a certain target every so often we set up the line to meet that demand is that uh is that part of your job is to like configure all of this stuff yeah so what i you know there's a couple of parts that go with running the shop one is making sure that you have all of the parts in place that we need to have the second is making sure that you get the right people in the right spot doing the right thing and so we invest a lot of time and technology to make that easier for the operator when we first started a lot of the people in the plant probably have the capability to do a lot more of the engine build themselves and as we've increased in size we just have to teach people to be really good at one or two operation as opposed to knowing how to build the whole engine coach you ready yeah ninjas got it [Music] so you've got more equipment designed by our engineering team and so i'll give you a quick high-level overview then we'll let ninja show you how it works but if you think about installing rings on a pissed in the old-school way you either got lots of bloody fingers or you got a pair of pliers and you're trying to get that spread and get on there and seated properly the other thing too is if you're doing you know if you're doing thousands of pistons in a day it could be you know one of the failures you could have is to miss a ring which is bad in an engine so our engineering team developed a process that would make it so even somebody who's never done it before like yourself could step in here and be able to install the rings in the right order on the pistons and then once that's done to be able to install the connecting rod in the wrist pin to the piston so we're gonna have him show you how this works and then if you want somebody else to take the camera we'll get a video of it being so simple that somebody who's never done it before should be able to do it but i say never done it before never ran it on this machine um yeah i've only i've done it a couple times you know by hand it's not that fun but you'll have an appreciation for this after after seeing it so ninja why don't you explain to them what you're doing right now we just got a standard 350 kind of piston here you've got your valve releases here there's a little notches there's basically no way that this will run without it installed properly the right way like it could be upside down and it will not work so it won't fit in there with those notches yeah yeah if you put the notches in there and it doesn't trip those two pieces right there the machine won't fire yeah and so when we talk about mistake proofing and preventing stuff from being done wrong that's one of the things that's designed into the machine is for this operation the only thing that operator really has to pay attention to is to make sure that our logo is face up on that rod if they do that we've removed everything else to try to prevent you from putting the piston on backwards we got a magnet here kind of holds the wrist pin up there that's locked and loaded now he's going to heat up the piston so sometimes you'll see people using like a propane burner and almost like a grill top to heat up the pan end yeah we got the old school way set up over there but this is all induction heating it heats it up to about 600 degrees there for you it usually goes about five seconds [Music] slide it over here that wrist panel just pushed right in set up perfectly positioned perfectly right there for you so if you think about everything that can go wrong with getting the wrist pin the rod and the piston together getting them off center having them get stuck not having them be the right temperature and things like that this is all designed by our engineering team to be able to control as much of that as possible so when we talk about reducing the complexity if that's the only thing you really have to worry about as an operator and not getting burned that's pretty pretty simplified from what we're used to doing does ninja make mistakes okay not as much on the automated stuff all right ninja you want to train him how to do this and then we'll uh we'll let him take a crack at it uh yeah this is so easy we have like a nine-year-old kid do it it'll have all these indications of which uh direction he'll go whatever so you just look at the picture copy the picture yeah you just stick it in there and it puts the rings right on for you so that one's going up or whatever stick it in there you got your first oil rail on so when you press it in there it hits that button and yeah it's actually a magnet i think where the magnet will hit so when it's in there in the right spot right then it'll depress and yep okay press and shoot one out at a time pretty amazing flip it over 180 degrees and stick it in your next one you'll put your other oil rail right on there for you so then that's one holder scale 45 or 90 290. there's your second ring a whole do one 180 right here and then there's your top line that's very satisfying to watch yes sir is it my turn now yeah if you want let's go ahead okay let's see if i can figure this out if a nine year old could do it i think i'll be all right screen goes dark and you want to see what you're doing just touch it again and that'll light back up okay so now we've switched rolls i'm gonna try to put this together i'm taking this now the most important thing is to have a big smile on your face while you do this so everybody knows how fun this is yeah so we put it up with the f on the top yep because there's no f on this side i noticed that already so using my brain here [Music] yep pull it out make sure it seats there you go and the next step is going to be one of the first oil rings just a slight rotation the machine will feed the ring on there for you all right see it's in place the other side now [Music] might have been a little bit of a delay from how long it was in there probably fed a second one i messed it up yeah this is so easy we had like a nine-year-old kid do it you're doing it in the right sequence we'd probably have to coach you a little bit on speed after some training there you go remove good the final final two rings very very important i did it but i messed up once now so from there then it's ready to have the the connecting rod installed to it which we just covered so ninja wants to show us it's a game speed we want why we call them ninja we want to that was only about 50 seconds faster than your time so now you know how good you can be once you're trained like a ninja yeah go to ninja school fun place to work heck yeah it's awesome hearing the motors runs pretty awesome too you get a big block going kind of gets your your adrenaline going too while you're working when they're done oh yeah we got some guys who will let out a big whoo every time we dine to an engine it sounds great does he put things together faster when there's a big block on the dyno like you know what i haven't paid attention enough to find that out he's happier when we're running big blocks all day so they built that whole machine in back there yep that's awesome did the design they ordered the components they assembled and installed that programmed it and everything so we didn't actually fabricate the 80 20 or the boxes we bought all that but the assembly and everything was done by us all right so now we're in assembly one of the things you'll notice right away is there are less manual torque wrenches and more dedicated specific tools so you can look on the left side here these are dc torque tools it's got a pre-programmed setting that they have to hit one is for the center bolt and then one is for the display bolt on a four bolt main so when they go through and torque instead of having to do it all by hand or run it in with an air inch and then finish it this will actually drive that in and seat the bolt and make sure that it gets torqued to the right set so from an investment standpoint you've talked about the size of the facility it's probably at least two times larger than our previous facility and around the plant you're going to continue to see upgrades and investment and technology so the light system that you see around the plant that's to help the operator out so you got one right here if you get a yellow light it means that you've got a part shortage you've got a red light it means there's a quality issue if you got a green light it means everything is running good so we're trying to increase our ability to support the team that's doing all of the hard work by getting the engines put together or the little tricks like that stuff that you brought here from your background yeah if you go into any big engine manufacturing you're gonna see things that try to make performance visual whether it's the output of the machine or if it's the flow of parts through the plant so as we improve our ability to support the team doing building the engines making it visual just increases the increases the speed with we're able to respond and take care of the issues that they have is there somebody paying attention to those lights or whose job is it to stall it out any leader that works on my team is trained to do that they carry a radio or they have a phone so if they see an issue they can call somebody right away and get them here and allow the operator to stay at their station and keep working this line has been in place for us for about six months but we're still trying to get everything in place to run it the way that we want to this is jeff jeff how many pistons do you think you've installed in your career about a million and a half about a million so he's put in about a million and a half pistons you think about a guy who's putting a million and a half pistons they've done it over and over they're very precise they do a great job he catches issues that you would be amazed that he has the ability to tell by how he installs them one of our challenges is if jeff ever wants to have a day off to put somebody there and have them go do as good as he does it's challenging without that much practice so we've got machines that are designed to remove the variation and make it easier for a newer person to be able to do what he's doing with as close to a level of quality you can have if you haven't installed a million and a half pistons so you'll see tools like this around the plant that help us increase our flexibility and reduce the complexity of what we're doing and that's really one of the themes i hope you pick up on around the plant less complicated more flexible which gives us the ability to control quality better and make it so that we have a very consistent product going out the door yeah i have noticed that you got little little tips and tricks everywhere there you go you know some of the things that we do you got an oil pump and a pickup screen that sub assembled together so when it gets there he can just put that on the block instead of having to stop put the pickup screen in attach it go through and make sure that gets torqued properly and set before it gets installed so those are some of the things that we try to do is have as much product line side as we can so they don't have to leave the line as much it still happens where they'll run a unique engine and they might not have everything they need or if something broke along the way he'll have to get it fixed but that's our goal is to have more and more stuff line side to improve on flow for these aluminum heads it's a big block chevy derivative style head we do an incoming inspection to make sure that they were made right for us and after that initial inspection is done they get assigned a part number that part number is probably going to be the same part number if you go to our website and look for a head kit that's going to correspond with these numbers so they get inspected we go through we might remove some burrs and things like that that could be bad inside of the engine we'll go through some most aluminum heads don't require very much work but if you're using like a an mls style gasket or something like that you've got to be a lot more particular about your surface finish so this is just a mill underneath this guard there's a head that's got multiple tools on it it'll rotate you'll set the head in here it'll go through do a pass and then when it comes out they'll do an inspection so they'll check to make sure that the valve can seat in there properly and be at the right specs and then they'll also check it for surface finishing i don't see the surface but he's got the ability to to put a gauge on the head and it'll it'll go back and forth and then i'll give you a reading to make sure we hit the right surface from there you can see after machining you get some coolant and some chips and things from machining so they'll go through they'll go through a hot dunk wash that'll get done dunked and agitated up and down and then this is the importance of that washer that you saw you can see it's just a brush and a drill and so they have to go through and do a lot of those holes by hand with that individual drill so you think about how many different bolt holes there are to pay attention to that's where that value of that robot comes in after they get washed they get set with valves to make sure you've got the right intake and exhaust valves in them and then they're staged up for build one of the things about a head build when you watch these guys do it they make it look really easy but to actually do it the way that they're doing it there's a lot of different components that they have to get on there so they ought to make sure that you know they get they got the right stencil on there and that it's seated properly and there isn't a cut or a lip so you don't get a leak they've got retainers they've got springs they've got keepers they've got all this stuff they have to go in and do so when they're done they go through and he'll when he's going through and he's setting up the station so he can go through and flow when he's building it but you can see all of the different components that are on there that that were needed for the build that he installed here how long does it take you to build a head from from there to yeah by like three four minutes ago because i do five in a row and then i so it takes time but yeah so once he gets his workstation set up the flow he just goes through and processes if you or i tried to build it it'd take us you know a half hour to get everything to go in place you start thinking about the keepers you got any features you can look at so one of the things you have to do when you're building that is you have to get the spring on there you got to get the seal in there and you've got to get that valve in there and you have to get those keepers to seat properly and they're small and they're flimsy so if you're not used to doing it it's really common to have them slip out for a new person so once these guys develop the touch they go through and make sure that they can get them on there and that they stay and they inspect them to make sure that they're right so this is just a quick gauge where they can go through and press down on it to make sure that it's got the proper amount of resistance on it so they inspect that and then we also just do a really quick air check on the ports to make sure that the head doesn't leak after it's finished thank you he's in the zone so this is one of the coolest additions if you've ever installed a head you'll have an appreciation for it but before what these guys used to have to do is we've got a very specific torque sequence and a head gasket conditioning procedure that we do that requires a lot of torquing and turning on it so our manufacturing engineering team set up this robot station to be able to go through the operator has the head bolts loosely in there the robot is a positioning device where it's programmed to get the torque tool to the right place the torque tool that's on there is a dc torque tool that's the same thing that you saw at piston install and crank install so zach go ahead and fire it up i see the the light curtain perimeter around there stop it from running if anybody gets in there and it's not uncommon to have somebody like myself who's not around it very often to have a shirt or something you know just barely catch it then these guys got to come reset it so i try to keep my distance outside of those yellow lines that way i'm not the cause of this field yeah it's got a predetermined sequence same sequence that these guys have to memorize and know from their instructions to install it's programmed in so once they get the head set and brought around the corner and put in place the machine takes over a lot of the repetitive motion type work that could increase the wear and tear on an operator and you know you think about getting things torqued properly you can get it over torque you can get it under torque you can have it cross thread and give you a false torque reading so this is programmed you can see when the box is going off after it does that a green light comes on every time that green light flashes on on the head and they get a little number that tells you what the reading was for that torque for that step so what we don't want to see but does happen sometimes is if that torque reading is out of spec it'll flash red and freeze in the spot where it was at so you could come out and troubleshoot and try to figure out what went wrong where does it go to get the push rods rockers and intake manifold we're going to go there you know we build a variation of engines that have different requirements once you get the push rod set once you get it to zero lash then you have the amount of turn that you've got to put in and it varies we've got stamped steel rockers we've got roller rockers and so the operator at this operation they have documentation that tells them what they're supposed to do but as he goes through and does this there's a lot of different things he has to pay attention to you got to make sure that the rockers set in the right place on the valve tip you got to make sure that the lashes set properly if you got a poly lock on there you got to make sure that not only are they installed properly but they get locked into place so there's a lot of um very fine details that an operator's got to pay attention to when they're building the engine rotates that you can see the rockers actually move so now you can see they're in different positions on the engine based off of where the camera is you want to make sure everything is seated properly and then now he's going to go through and do the adjustment so after they leave here where do they go now we're going to go all the way around the corner to dino how close are you going to do five minutes five minutes to show time all right well these guys will see it like that ah so once the engines are built they'll come around to this stage and now you're getting ready to customize the engine based off of what a customer wants so you can see we've got edelbrock we've got wind we've got our own product line of intakes and dyno components water pumps distributor caps plug wires things of that nature so we want to provide options for our customers so they can get what they want some guys are going to want a long block with valve covers and a dipstick other people are going to want them like the deluxe engine over here when you start to look at this bad boy it's got the carburetor it's got the distributor plugs plug wires fuel pump fuel lines water pump balancer so there's even a product line that we offer that continues to add more components to it so transmissions and things like that are part of our offering so whether you're somebody who wants to do all the work yourself or you want somebody to do it for you our goal is to get as much content on that engine to make it easier on the install for the customers you can go all the way from just a bare short block or a pair of cylinder heads to whole drive train car oil pan with the transmission ready to rock exactly and you know one of the things that we've learned over time as fewer and fewer people have as much experience working on engines before the turnkey option you know you think about some of those those kit cars you got factory five super performances lots of people out there that have these beautiful looking cars and they want a new engine for it they want to drive it they want to go have fun with their toy they might not want to take the time it takes to build an engine and that gives us the ability to service them and provide them with more and more content to make it get them in their vehicles that much quicker so this is the uh the actual production dyno yep we've got four four production dyno booths that we use in operations in addition to the ones you saw back in r d so there's a lot of money invested as a company and being able to run these engines and put them through a test that will help make sure when they get to the customer's vehicle we've reduced as much risk as we can we inspect for leaks we cut every oil filter a hundred percent and check it to make sure that after it's been through that initial pull there aren't any issues um we check for blow by there's a lot of intricate details that we look at on every engine that we dyno and for us dynoing every single engine there's the cool factor about getting your dyno sheet and seeing what your horsepower and torque is there's also that peace of mind knowing that that engine has been run we use the same type of gas that a customer can use out in the street we've got fuel tanks and pumps that get gas to the dynos these bad boys get run and they get run pretty hard to make sure that when they leave we know that they're gonna be a good throttle how close are you ready okay so the avis is gonna do an engine pull we do a couple of small pulls to make sure everything is going up to speed properly and then you'll fit here that one big pole that's a small block chevy you know what what it is or what it's supposed to do this looks like it's a flat tactic cast iron headed small block she had these for us with a stroke of cranking [Applause] and then we run it up you know just right around that 6000 rpm mark which you're probably not going to do the first thing you do once you get the engine installed 461 406. [Music] the torque 461. so you can see this engine and every engine has a different spec based off of the components so when we go through and look at it he's comparing to make sure that that engine met what it was supposed to so you can see it beat on horsepower and beat on torque from what the uh requirements were for that engine so the advertised number on when you buy an engine is the minimum number they could see here that's what we're yeah that's what our target is every time is to make sure that we're hitting at least what we're advertising that's cool when you put on a pulley kit and you get this bad boy ready to install you look at all the boxes in there somebody who doesn't do this every day has got a lot to figure out so when we're doing it here we've got guys who install pulley kits as one of their primary functions so they are able to go through open up the kits get it sorted out lay it out get it ready you can see he's getting the water pump ready behind you so they go through and they get everything set up and then they install it so these guys are engine enthusiasts so dylan behind us here dylan how many cars do you have that you put engines in a lot so you like to drive demo cars so you go through repairs so you know when he's not at work one of his hobbies has to do with automotive type enthusiast hobbies whether it's doing his his demo derby i'm not here on that job most of the time so you're pretty much doing the same kind of stuff all day every day yeah so when he leaves for fun what he does is mirrors very closely to what he does here you buy a lot of cars and flip them so i usually pull motors in trainings and sell those to other buyers when i put my other cars seems like most of the people here are car enthusiasts yeah either either they're like me and they wish they were better at it or they're like dylan and they do it for a living but there is a passion that comes with having this be what we do every day and the cool factor of knowing where it's going and if you look at this one um you start to see that's a black throttle body poly sniper fuel injected system so you've got a traditional carburetor and then you've got a fuel injected throttle body style uh fuel injection system that we installed so again lots of different options that we produce or that we have purchased for us that we put on our engines and then the guy installing this does it over and over and he does it in his spare time so i can't i can't propose to you a better way to have it done than to have somebody who does it over and over and that's our goal is to make it as turnkey as possible for the end user you've got an 376 it's got our base engine offering on it that we would typically offer and you can see we've installed you know the front drive kit and the pulleys and everything that would need to go with it to help that thing be as close to turnkey as possible we don't have a transmission on it now but we do have packages where those transmissions are available which is a great value for the customers so after the engines are tested i mentioned we cut and do a filter inspection on every single one so we go through and look for anything in the filter that doesn't look right they get cleaned we put labels on them we put a serial number with every single engine so if somebody has an issue they can come back to us and then when it's done it gets a bag on it to protect it during shipping and then it gets a crate put around it so it really takes the mystery on why we call it a crate engine that's one of the common questions that we get well that's why there's not a lot of scientific knowledge to it it goes into creating out the door so who builds the crate for the crate engine so we have a company who builds who builds different components of the crate for us and then these guys put it together if it's a deluxe engine like this has got the fuel pump it's probably got an air cleaner on it water pump all of those things it gets a lot more protection and shipment because there's more that can be damaged you can also just see the the crate style with the open slats on the side doesn't require as much protection in transit so based off of the level of dress that's what determines the level of sophistication of crate needed uh so this is our research and development department uh we're doing some uh dyno testing on a 632 right now that might be kind of fun to watch we've got it right over here in our first dyno cell is that that's the cool one this one you want to see this is the big daddy this is the one that makes over 800 horsepower naturally aspirated so what is like the the technical rundown on these things uh so our 632 has got 11 to 1 compression ratio it's a fully forged rotating assembly it's got our blueprint engines uh 80 80 12 heads on it it's got edelbrock super victor intake so this is actually our dyno mule so we've had this engine around the research and development department we've done all of all of our camshaft testing cylinder head testing induction all sorts of fuel systems this has been the mule engine that we've used for that it's it's got right around 800 dyno poles on it up to 65 7 000 rpm so it's it's it's had a hard life but it's it's still running great but uh with that many pulls on it do you think it'll still make the like close to the advertised number i think we're going to find out that'd be cool maybe you can do some dyno pulls and we'll see i'll try that out i've never i never ran an engine dyno before but this thing's pretty freaking sweet all the way 7000 rpm how long has a stroke in one of these ah this is a 4750 stroke that's a 6.635 h beam connecting rod it's got mala motorsports forged pistons in it we dyno test every engine at blueprint engines this is just the research and development department so we have three dyno cells in here where we do all of our development work and out on the manufacturing floor we have another four dinos for blueprint engines is it ready to fire up right now she's ready to go well let's do it i've watched a lot of videos of people running these things and never actually witnessed it in person [Music] [Applause] [Music] you got to tell it where you want to start the dino pole where you want to end the dino pool and there's literally a start stop button that you push after when you want to start the pull and then after the pull you take the throttle out of it you want to give it a shot yeah i'll try it all right take the mouse and click start go ahead and slowly throttle you'll see that the dyno brick so there you go there's your first dyno test to see how much power you made so here we got it peaked out at 839 horsepower at 6100 rpm and you know this platform is it's really durable too like this is our mule it's got 800-ish dyno poles on it we'll call it 8-10 now so you can just see how reliable the package is i mean you can really beat up on it i think i think it'd be pretty cool an old suburban yeah that would actually be really neat i don't think i've ever seen one of these in a suburban i can fix that let's fix that if this one leaves we're gonna have to get a new mule something's happening right now is this what i think it is yeah you're 632. dino she's trapped uh taped onto it there's a 632 in my truck how about that congratulations thank you sir bro i got a 632 we got the mule all loaded up this thing is ready to do some more mule stuff oh yeah it was around for five years or so they said yeah in an r d department yeah used it for testing and for chores so it's got at least 800 pulls on it that's so cool i like that that's the best way to do it right there yeah it's well broken oh good well that just happened i'm gonna leave this one open-ended go back to texas and unload this thing in a following video that you will see shortly also i filmed a lot of videos in there besides the factory tour so we're going to be sprinkling that in let me know what you want to know more about this place you know like some employee interviews like how you want to work here if you want to work in a place like this all that stuff just so much this is a great trip i can't wait to get back and tear this thing out of the box and check it out because this is going to be one serious unit you

Channel: Stapleton42

Views: 787,756

Rating: 4.9123054 out of 5

Keywords: crate engine, blueprint engines, factory tour, how its made, stapleton42, 632 big block, 10.3l, toast camaro, cleetus toast, Aussie big block, 632ci, 540ci, biggest engine, blue print engines, Kearney, race week, Rocky Mountain race week, 1320video, engine plant, engine dyno, custom engineering, Mitchell stapleton, lsxcalade, boom tube, x pipe, monte carlo, muscle car, tall deck, all motor, nitrous, newell coach, mark martin, cleetus mcfarland, roots blower, supercharged, billet

Id: Jzr2U8bGpvc

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CrysisCamaro]

I watched this earlier this week. Was pretty cool to see how a non-car maker does "mass" production on engines. Automation is nowhere near as prevalent but they are slowly going in that direction. Crazy how that one guy can assemble a head in 4 minutes.

[u/mymomisyourfather]

The machines they have are stupidly expensive. Those DC tools they show for the conrods/main bearing caps are like 15k usd each. They are prevalent in automotive since they build an engine every 1-3 minutes, but these guys dont do that volume

Which means that these guys ship a shit ton of engines for a good margin for this to be a profitable business.

[u/YouAreMentalM8]

Saw this video earlier and loved it. Manufacturing and hand work like this makes me have a greater appreciation for the final product.

[u/C-C-X-V-I]

I have one of their 306's in my F250, absolutely love it.

[u/verdegirl22]

lol operator has to hit an estop at 4min and guy is like yeah its normal this is how we machine

[u/Doip]

I love his Escalade. Seems like a cool guy but I know a few people who’ve met him who aren’t so impressed.

[u/retracedylan]

Oh this is weird. I drive by this building every day.