The World today......pay more, get less. Do we really expect anything else!??? Really??
Come on Edelbrock. Get your act together.
- Thread starter pittsburghracer
- Start date
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Daaaaaaaaaaang!
Rat Bastid
Dunamis Metron
Your son is going to find it’s near impossible to find a machinist any more. Every shop I know could hire at least one guy and a couple of shops could hire 3 or 4. They just can’t find them.
Everyone says find a kid, hire and train him. That would be great IF you could find a kid that was interested enough to even think about it and then motivated enough to learn it.
And…most of these kids coming in with zero experience expect to be paid like they can run every piece of equipment in the shop, know every procedure and know when to use what valve job and stuff like that.
Go to a non automotive machine shop and most of those places could hire 5 or more machinists right now. IF they could find them.
The schools are putting out kids who can write a CNC program and put stock in the machine but if they have to walk up to a manual lathe or mill they don’t have a clue.
Its bad out there for skilled labor. I feel bad for your son. Hopefully he can find someone.
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And you can do the same regarding that they're made in USA. Marketing propaganda on their web site isn't facts. It's marketing.
My local shop that I used for years is done. Johnny hurt his back again and at 65 last year he’s had enough. They had a good guy that worked at other shops around the area but during Covid he took a layoff and now doesn’t want to make the 80 mile road trip to work so he opened his own shop for a second time. They tried and failed to get Johnny an apprentice but failed at that too. A retired guy comes in once or twice to grind crankshafts on a 50/50 payout. They are lucky to have him.
33IMP
Well-Known Member
There is the bottom line. The owner wrecked it to put on a fancy valve cover, not you. It's his problem, not yours.
But looking at the pics of the new victor....... wow, that's BAD!
You call it marketing propaganda?
I call it a company statement of a fact.
I provided what I think is further proof as well as there video showing there foundry in prior threads.
You can cast all the doubt in the world but you can’t prove it.
If you can prove otherwise, awesome. Please do so!
Ya I know it isn’t my fault but knowing I could fix it if it was mine doesn’t help. I’m not a good aluminum welder but I have a spool gun and Tig welder so if it was mine I would weld and grind, weld and grind and raise it so it could be ported correctly. I just can’t or want to get into that on customers stuff. I can weld but I’m not a welder. But if any of you guys find yourself grabbing a grinder to remove enough wet Al to run your “FAB” covers let this be a lesson. Use these and do it right. Cheap no they are not as I know because I have two sets. Bolt right on??? No again. At least not for me. I had to elongate the bolt holes and do quite a bit of grinding for pushrod clearance. So fit them up on the engine stand with everything bolted in place.
MediceMfg ...Valve Cover Spacers - Mopar
First of all don’t think cnc operator’s or programers have no skill. Your just not in the right machine shop. I ran a 150 and 120mm horizontal boring bars for 27 years and various verticals as well after transitioning from 15 years of manual machining. I can manual program at the machine control. I can run cam programs and can stop if the program is cutting the wrong shape before it gets fucked up. Complex programs are run through a graphics program before material is cut to spot errors, you have to know what you are doing. The 100 other operators I worked with also knew what they were doing. I will agree there is a shortage of skilled labor but we are out there. Money is our motivation. Anything you can do on a manual machine, I can do on a cnc more accurately in half the time including fudging things in.
Rat Bastid
Dunamis Metron
I didn’t ALL CNC guys have no skill. I will say the vast majority of the younger ones I’ve encountered have very few skills.
As far as making more money, yeah if you do long production runs the CNC is faster.
Not everything is a production run.
NoCar340
The Original Partstitute
The "TL/DR" version of what follows: An independent foundry cranking out crap like that would not be around long regardless of location. Casting is a cut-throat business.
Long version: Sand casting is a fickle process. Sand is always going to be at least somewhat problematic just by its nature. A foundry needs to be run/supervised by a foundry guy--someone who's worked in the process and knows how to recognize problems and their causes. Owning the foundry is a double-edged sword: "Strict quality control" can very easily become "we only have to make ourselves happy."
That port with the huge intrusion was made by a core, which uses specially-treated sand that needs to be replaced fairly often. The sand in that particular core may have past its useful life for core work. Some fell out of the core prior to pouring and that's the result. Some of the uneven ports were probably caused by someone "fixing" sand loss by hand-smoothing cores--something every core guy does at some point. The rest of it looks like core shift, which tells me the patterns need attention. They're worn and aren't aligning properly (or the person setting cores needs a smack upside the head). Core shift is inevitable to some extent, but it shouldn't be that bad. I saw a lot of seemingly-OK castings get scrapped after machining.
Another problem is the fact that their machining center is apparently separate from the casting facility. The open end of that badly-intruded port may have looked OK fresh out of the mold, but once that surface got machined the flaw was right at the gasket surface. Does the guy running the machine even know to look for casting flaws? Probably not. "The guys at the foundry said it was fine. Run it."
At both foundries that employed me lifetimes ago, we did just enough machining and measuring on-site to know whether a part should be shipped for final machining. A simple test jig can save your butt from dozens or hundreds of flawed parts. Everyone along the line knew how to recognize a bad casting, and parts got scrapped at every stage of production. A 20% scrap rate was considered normal--one out of every five castings was garbage--for iron. The aluminum scrap rate was 10-15% higher. We were always looking to reduce that, but not at the cost of quality. Close enough, wasn't.
Hilariously enough, a lot of the in-process scrapping wasn't the result of some heartfelt dedication to quality--it was pure spite. "Screw the rich bastards in the office" wasn't an unusual attitude, and a lot of guys would gleefully condemn a potentially-OK-after-machining part for that reason alone. It was rarely questioned, too--better to scrap two good ones than send out one bad one.
Pattern-making and maintenance are expensive. Taking a pattern out of production to repair it means lost dollars. Well-run foundries have multiple patterns for the same mold. The pattern is rotated out after X number of copes/drags/cores for measurement, inspection, and repair. The "dash number" after the displacement in your block casting? That's the pattern number. If they had a bad batch of 2780930-340-6 blocks, they would have reason to suspect something was amiss with the #6 pattern. On Mopar blocks, I've seen pattern numbers as high as 10. Is Edelbrock doing this? I don't know, but it appears to me that "production, production, production" is pushing their foundry to add less "green sand" to the cope & drag line, run their core sand too long, and not properly maintain their patterns. Is that the foundry's fault, or are they simply trying to meet unrealistic demands from corporate? You'd almost have to work there to know.
I don't think it's a "country of origin" problem, I think it's a "quantity over quality" issue. Whomever owns Edelbrock now (it looks like IOP sold Edelbrock) probably has shareholders. Few things can affect quality quite like a stock IPO. A large group of people demanding ever-more return on their investment is a lot of pressure. You can make 'em happy two ways: Increase your prices or cut your costs (and eventually corners).
I can't speak to the overall quality since I've not measured or test-fitted yet, but my still-in-the-box Speedmaster heads look like much nicer castings than either of my NOS Six Pack intakes (340 & 440). After seeing these photos I'll give the Victor W-2 a much closer inspection prior to using it. The Strip Dominator it's replacing was a gem.
Long version: Sand casting is a fickle process. Sand is always going to be at least somewhat problematic just by its nature. A foundry needs to be run/supervised by a foundry guy--someone who's worked in the process and knows how to recognize problems and their causes. Owning the foundry is a double-edged sword: "Strict quality control" can very easily become "we only have to make ourselves happy."
That port with the huge intrusion was made by a core, which uses specially-treated sand that needs to be replaced fairly often. The sand in that particular core may have past its useful life for core work. Some fell out of the core prior to pouring and that's the result. Some of the uneven ports were probably caused by someone "fixing" sand loss by hand-smoothing cores--something every core guy does at some point. The rest of it looks like core shift, which tells me the patterns need attention. They're worn and aren't aligning properly (or the person setting cores needs a smack upside the head). Core shift is inevitable to some extent, but it shouldn't be that bad. I saw a lot of seemingly-OK castings get scrapped after machining.
Another problem is the fact that their machining center is apparently separate from the casting facility. The open end of that badly-intruded port may have looked OK fresh out of the mold, but once that surface got machined the flaw was right at the gasket surface. Does the guy running the machine even know to look for casting flaws? Probably not. "The guys at the foundry said it was fine. Run it."
At both foundries that employed me lifetimes ago, we did just enough machining and measuring on-site to know whether a part should be shipped for final machining. A simple test jig can save your butt from dozens or hundreds of flawed parts. Everyone along the line knew how to recognize a bad casting, and parts got scrapped at every stage of production. A 20% scrap rate was considered normal--one out of every five castings was garbage--for iron. The aluminum scrap rate was 10-15% higher. We were always looking to reduce that, but not at the cost of quality. Close enough, wasn't.
Hilariously enough, a lot of the in-process scrapping wasn't the result of some heartfelt dedication to quality--it was pure spite. "Screw the rich bastards in the office" wasn't an unusual attitude, and a lot of guys would gleefully condemn a potentially-OK-after-machining part for that reason alone. It was rarely questioned, too--better to scrap two good ones than send out one bad one.
Pattern-making and maintenance are expensive. Taking a pattern out of production to repair it means lost dollars. Well-run foundries have multiple patterns for the same mold. The pattern is rotated out after X number of copes/drags/cores for measurement, inspection, and repair. The "dash number" after the displacement in your block casting? That's the pattern number. If they had a bad batch of 2780930-340-6 blocks, they would have reason to suspect something was amiss with the #6 pattern. On Mopar blocks, I've seen pattern numbers as high as 10. Is Edelbrock doing this? I don't know, but it appears to me that "production, production, production" is pushing their foundry to add less "green sand" to the cope & drag line, run their core sand too long, and not properly maintain their patterns. Is that the foundry's fault, or are they simply trying to meet unrealistic demands from corporate? You'd almost have to work there to know.
I don't think it's a "country of origin" problem, I think it's a "quantity over quality" issue. Whomever owns Edelbrock now (it looks like IOP sold Edelbrock) probably has shareholders. Few things can affect quality quite like a stock IPO. A large group of people demanding ever-more return on their investment is a lot of pressure. You can make 'em happy two ways: Increase your prices or cut your costs (and eventually corners).
I can't speak to the overall quality since I've not measured or test-fitted yet, but my still-in-the-box Speedmaster heads look like much nicer castings than either of my NOS Six Pack intakes (340 & 440). After seeing these photos I'll give the Victor W-2 a much closer inspection prior to using it. The Strip Dominator it's replacing was a gem.
demonjim
Well-Known Member
Was gonna ask about that.
Dale Davies
Well-Known Member
Guys have been welding the top of the manifold on various engines for years before getting out the cutting burrs. Looks like that is required here. If an unmodified look is desired, the top of the weld can be leveled out after and sand blasted to get the sand cast look back.
Yes I do. That's what I believe and I'm stickin to it.
That was our discussion today on the phone. He works in a machine shop and has welder friends that are more than capable. I took a rough measurement to the scribe line I would be porting to and there would be .080 material left. Ideally it would be nice to weld it now but shipping both ways gets pretty expensive. I’m thinking I could port it and once back the welder could slide a piece of copper into the port as a backer, heat sink and on low heat apply enough weld to slightly clean it up for appearance and have the needed backing for gasket sealing. He talking to his welder this weekend.
RAMM
Well-Known Member
100% agree. J.Rob
RAMM
Well-Known Member
That's what I used to think too. Not true. Even the one off stuff is faster AND better with a CNC. Once youre proficient on a CNC you don't want to touch a manual mill you get that spoiled--lol. J.Rob
At almost 67 I would love to have the skills to operate the old Craftsman lathe I already own and the Bridgeport I passed on. The lathe I may have time left for but the barn door is closed on a Bridgeport idea.
33IMP
Well-Known Member
I passed on the Claussing lathe and Bridgeport mill, that I probably could have got for a song from my company when they closed the doors. Unfortunately, they were three phase 440volt, and I had neither the juice nor a place for them at the time.
Now that I do..... they are long gone. Oh well.....
Radar owns the shop where I had my 273 heads done. I was there a few days before Valentines Day (years ago) and one of the guys asked him what he was getting his wife for Valentines. He said "****, I forgot about that", went over to the scrap bucket and pulled out a square of billet aluminum. He clamped it down to the Bridgeport table and proceeded to carve out a perfect heart, radiused corners and all. He finished up with metal stamps and a engraver. It was the coolest.
Bakerlite
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Yep, it's the same here. But one thing I will say is that it's not the schools fault, it's just the way kids are today, they just don't want to do this type of work. They don't get influenced by the teachers, who most of the time they think are old and out of touch, it's the net, the influencers etc. They just don't want to work in those types of environments these days.. they think they are better than that..
Bakerlite
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Pay more in wages, pay more for products. That's the circle.
Ohhhh boy here’s a deal of a lifetime. Lol
Ok guys I think this worked out the best that it could. Rather than risk warping the intake by welding he ordered a new one that will be delivered mid week. Then he will either clean up the port entrance and use it on his wife’s car or sell it as is to hopefully a 328 type build. I hate to see people spend money they shouldn’t have to spend but in the end he will have a set of heads that flow over 300cfm and a new Victor340 that will complete the topend and with his .600 plus lift cam should run pretty good.
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