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Pro/ENGINEER Takes Pole Position
- by Jim Buchanan

There's a lot you can't say about Toyota Racing Development, or TRD. Costa-Mesa, California-based TRD is one of several of Toyota's competition racing arms around the world. Toyota turns up in many of the world's most prestigious associations, from Formula One and NASCAR to the All-Japan Grand Touring Car Championship, and the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA).

But if you ask the TRD team, who they're building engines for, or what their top horsepower is, they'll be reluctant to say.

That's because much of what goes on in the world of ultra-high performance professional racing is, well, secret.

Meet Mark England, a manufacturing engineer at TRD. What he can say is that his team's main job is to machine the engine blocks and cylinder heads that are used in some of Toyota's America-based racing vehicles. His team receives castings of the eight-cylinder blocks and heads, then performs the necessary machining to turn them into finished components, ready for assembly with pistons, camshafts, crankshafts and the other parts that will make the complete engines.

The engines go to various races around the United States, and for any given competition, TRD might send 15 engines to cover the half-dozen or more vehicles for an entire weekend of racing. At the race, the engines are used for race, practices, and for backup. A level of redundancy is sometimes necessary because, England notes, these race engines are built for speed, not for longevity.

Tight deadlines. The job has its pressures. After all, England is competing against the world's best engine builders.

"The engine blocks and cylinder heads we make are used for production and development," he says. "Production components go to the race track. Development components are used for in-house testing, because we're constantly working to improve the designs that go into production."

So in addition to the 15 production engines needed for a particular race weekend, TRD is regularly building and testing new engine and head designs.

"For a new design, we'll start by building a number of engines with slightly different specifications," England says. "Then we'll test them all, and take the best one. That becomes our production specification. Then we'll work on improving that basic model."

"And with each change, we have to build a new engine for testing. Whatever changed parts we are responsible for will have to be machined here and then we order the crankshaft, pistons, camshaft or other new components from our supplier. Then we assemble them and put the engine on our dynamometer - a machine that measures horsepower and torque."

England's team is working against deadlines at all times. "In some cases, we're turning around a new engine configuration in a matter of days," he says.

Shaving toolpath time. England's team looks for any advantage they can get in shaving time from the process of programming the toolpaths, and running the milling machines, that turn the block and head castings into race-ready components.

Shaving toolpath programming time is important, because of the dual pressures of tight deadlines and ultra-high quality work. Tolerances are extremely tight, and the blocks and heads are full of complex features.

An example is an intake or exhaust port - these are critical components in racing engines because they regulate the engine's "breathing". Their design is highly proprietary, and frequently modified to account for slight changes in air temperature or humidity that the engines might encounter at a specific race track.

"An intake or exhaust port is extremely intricate," England says. "It bends and twists, has small complex radii and hidden areas that make it very difficult to access from either end, and it requires long, complex tools and complicated toolpaths. If the tool is too weak or if the toolpath is too aggressive, the tool will chatter and leave a bad surface finish."

To machine these complex components, TRD uses the five-axis capabilities of Pro/ENGINEER Complete Machining. With five-axis, the cutting machine can move left, right, up and down, and can rotate clockwise and counter-clockwise. All are required for cutting the complex surfaces of ports and other features.

Without the five-axis capabilities, TRD would have to change the positioning of the component, and change the tool settings more frequently. This would add greatly to programming and manufacturing time, considering that the ports alone may require several hundred-thousand lines of code.

Minimizing tool changes, maximizing associativity. Another timesaver is England's ability to toolpath output to specific milling tools in Pro/ENGINEER.

"Pro/ENGINEER Complete Machining has a subroutine function that lets you output toolpaths 'by tool,' and then copy those toolpaths to other locations on the component," he says. "Say you have 10 identical pockets you need to machine, and each one will require five tools. Without this function, you'd go to the first pocket, swap the tool five times, and then go to the second pocket, and so on. So this is a tremendous timesaver."

England also commends the associativity of Pro/ENGINEER for helping save time, particularly in development and testing operations.

"Our engine designers use Pro/ENGINEER," England says. "Pro/ENGINEER has the ability to embed manufacturing intelligence in with the geometry features. Because the design model and our manufacturing model are associative, that means that in most cases, if there is a change to the design model, the toolpath will update automatically."

This saves time in cases where England and the designer must combine efforts to make sure a key component is manufacturable. This happens frequently, says England, during new-engine development. Because mostly all developments are one-off designs, there's a strong likelihood that changes will be passed back and forth.

Handling the pressure. Because England's team can handle the pressure of competing at a world-class level and dealing with constantly-changing specifications, the Costa-Mesa-based TRD is able to maximize Toyota's competitive advantage in designing and machining race engines.

"Up until four years ago, we were basically a small design and machine shop," says England. "We designed the engines then contracted them out for machining. But then we [TRD] decided that the actual machining of the blocks and heads was so important that we'd rather bring it all in house and keep it proprietary. So that's what we did. It meant an increased workload, but one that we're able to handle with Pro/ENGINEER."

Click on images below for larger view

Sample cylinder head machined at TRD