Ben and Stephen start fresh out the gate talking about ADKAR sandwiches. Stephen happily announces that the Pocket NC is up and running at 100% again. The two stepper motors and their pullies powering the B-table have been replaced and it’s time to continue cutting brass. Ben touches on micro accelerometers and their applications in fluids and consumable devices like cutting tools, and then Stephen is fed up with 3D printed foot bridges. Ben attempts to close with the advances in lightweighting, but the two get distracted talking about cars like a bunch of little boys.
Benjamin’s Linked In www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-moses-b13b44a2/ Amateur Machinist Blog swarfysteve.blogspot.com/ Music provided by www.freestockmusic.com
Transcript:
Benji Moses: 00:05 Welcome to the Tech Trends podcasts everyone. We are here to discuss the latest manufacturing technology, research and news. I am Benji Moses, the Director of Manufacturing Technology and I am here with…
Steven LaMarca: 00:14 Steven LaMarca, Manufacturing Technology Analyst.
Benji Moses: 00:17 Steve, how was your weekend?
Steven LaMarca: 00:18 It was great! And let’s not forget that we are joined by our producer, editor, and AV engineer, the content kid himself, Adam Gambrell, the hardest working person in IMTS show business.
Benji Moses: 00:33 Wow. That’s quite an intro.
Adam Gambrell: 00:34 Did Jules put you up to that?
Steven LaMarca: 00:35 No, I did that.
Adam Gambrell: 00:36 Oh really? Because I’m flattered.
Steven LaMarca: 00:37 Because I wanted to say that you were the hardest working. Jules would say it’s her.
Adam Gambrell: 00:41 I’m flattered. Jules is very selfless, so she would probably also say that. But, I very much appreciate it. Thank you guys.
Benji Moses: 00:47 Glad Adam’s here and recognized.
Adam Gambrell: 00:49 Couldn’t do it without you.
Benji Moses: 00:49 Well done, Steve. You want to know what kind of sandwich I made?
Steven LaMarca: 00:52 Tell me about your sandwich!
Benji Moses: 00:54 I like my meats cut thin. So, sliced turkey.
Steven LaMarca: 01:00 I have something I have to tell you.
Benji Moses: 01:02 And then I put provolone cheese.
Steven LaMarca: 01:04 Okay, nice.
Benji Moses: 01:05 That’s it.
Steven LaMarca: 01:06 Nice.
Benji Moses: 01:06 On some split-top honey wheat bread.
Steven LaMarca: 01:08 So, I switched it up this weekend and I went turkey.
Benji Moses: 01:12 Turkey, nice.
Steven LaMarca: 01:13 Yeah, I went turkey and, typically, don’t like turkey. I can’t stand turkey. It like the most flavorless cold cut you can get.
Benji Moses: 01:21 Sure.
Steven LaMarca: 01:23 Dude, I’ve been doing ham and cheese. I’ve been doing honey baked ham and American cheese a lot lately. So let’s switch it up. And, I just mosey on over to the Walmart deli. They have a deli. You can get fresh cut meats there.
Benji Moses: 01:35 You’re sure it’s not plastic?
Steven LaMarca: 01:37 It might be. But, it tastes great. Let me tell you right now. They’ve got like a handful of different turkeys. You can get smoked turkey. You can get oven-roasted turkey. You can get low sodium turkey which probably means plastic.
Benji Moses: 01:50 I’m on a low sodium craze.
Steven LaMarca: 01:52 You can do, there’s another one that’s black peppercorn crusted turkey.
Benji Moses: 01:58 That’s good.
Steven LaMarca: 01:59 And, then the one that caught my eye that I was like “Oh my god I am definitely buying this turkey,” Cajun-spiced turkey.
Benji Moses: 02:05 Cajun-spiced turkey, that’s a good call…
Steven LaMarca: 02:06 Cajun rubbed turkey. The turkey almost looks marbled. There’s like streaks of red in it and its like “oh man that’s cayenne pepper.”
Benji Moses: 02:18 They’ve injected the meat.
Steven LaMarca: 02:20 Yeah, it’s almost like carved, deep-fried, spicy turkey. I put that on brioche with muenster. And polish mayonnaise.
Benji Moses: 02:32 I forgot you had polish mayonnaise.
Steven LaMarca: 02:33 French brioche, polish mayonnaise.
Benji Moses: 02:36 When I went to the store, I got turkey, a box of turkey, and a box of roast beef.
Steven LaMarca: 02:40 Nice. Love roast beef.
Benji Moses: 02:43 So, this weekend, I was wanting to mention, that, this long holiday weekend, I had a lot of free time on my hands. So instead of just staring at my wife and kid, to make it productive…
Steven LaMarca: 02:51 You cleaned the kitchen!
Benji Moses: 02:53 No, it’ll always be dirty. Once in a while I’ll do the dishes. But, I figured this is a similar application to when I working back at Eaton. When time would slow down, that’s the best time to do some level of process improvement. So, you’re conflicted when the times are busy. So, when aerospace ramps up quite a bit, your demand for producing parts on time is really, really high. If you’re holding up an engine that’s holding up an aircraft…I mean there’s severe penalties once you’re holding up the final delivery to the customer.
Steven LaMarca: 03:24 You don’t want to be a bottleneck.
Benji Moses: 03:24 You don’t want to make the news because you’re late for a delivery.
Steven LaMarca: 03:27 Right.
Benji Moses: 03:28 So, when things slow down, that’s the best time for some level of process improvement. So, over the weekend, I was running some home improvement stuff where I was putting a tint on the window, it’s a tall window that I had. So I was putting a shade, I was just putting a frosted tint on it, came out great, because I had time to do it, I had time to monkey around with it. Also, I was running some network stuff into the attic to help run some equipment up there.
Benji Moses: 03:56 But, applying this to business world. So you’ve got your biggest constraint which is time, that has been reduced, if you’re in a downturn that you have tons of time on… assuming you’re able to maintain the resources. And that’s one caveat I’ll add to this, if you’re able to keep your resources during the downturn, the biggest thing that you can do is, start implementing a continuous improvement.
Benji Moses: 04:17 But before we get to get, while times are busy, you need to maintain a warehouse of things to do. I mean, we’re doing that now in any type of articles that we’re writing. We’re just warehousing tons and tons of information. So when the time is right, we able to implement that.
Benji Moses: 04:29 Some basic tools that also are important. So you’ve got a list of projects that you’ve got when things are busy delegating some of the business plan, the business side of it. So everyone always has ideas on how to solve a problem.
Steven LaMarca: 04:43 Yes.
Benji Moses: 04:43 But Connecting your problem and solution to what the business is going to gain is very, very important. That connection is misunderstood quite a bit on lot of layers of manufacturing.
Steven LaMarca: 04:51 Yeah.
Benji Moses: 04:51 So once you started getting out of the business side of the manufacturer or the sales logistics magic side of it, and you’ve just on the operations side of it, you kind of lose a little of that connection of… hey, I also have a profit to make, right?
Steven LaMarca: 05:05 Right.
Benji Moses: 05:06 So connecting that and educating the workforce of “Hey, what’s the return on investment if I implement this?” and giving them basic tools. So using Five Whys, that gets you pretty far before you even get to the physical step of problem solving.
Benji Moses: 05:19 Ergonomics is a really underrated problem that can be solved, that needs to be solved more often. There’s a couple of tests that we’d done. So on our couplings, we had a functional tests, we had a wrap our couplings around an inspection gauge and latch it, and then torque down the nut.
Steven LaMarca: 05:35 Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Benji Moses: 05:35 So the operator, I do that 100% of our couplings. So we produce twenty thousand couplings a year. That’s twenty thousand times as [Crosstalk 00:05:41].
Benji Moses: 05:41 So if you’re able to automate that process so the person isn’t holding a gun and they have to torque too, and things like that.
Steven LaMarca: 05:49 Right.
Benji Moses: 05:49 That extends their life, that extends their productivity. So being able to implement those things to allow the operator to improve the ergonomics and improve your missed opportunity rate helps a lot. And also there’s a tool called addCar, which is super useful.
Steven LaMarca: 06:05 Yeah.
Benji Moses: 06:07 And you know, just implementing standard processes or standard documentation for implementing these process. That’s super useful in terms of, it helps remove the subjectivity of, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, let me implement this.” If you follow these five steps and it comes out correct at the end, go ahead and do it. So the delegation and the standard processes, my two number one seeds for implementing continuous improvement during the downturn. So just something to think about over the weekend and as you’re implementing stuff.
Benji Moses: 06:34 So, what’s the tests had up to this week?
Steven LaMarca: 06:36 So the test bed last week better say, well this week we’re going to plan on moving forward, cutting breasts, continuing with our project lists.
Benji Moses: 06:44 Making chips.
Steven LaMarca: 06:45 I actually want to get back into making chips finally-
Benji Moses: 06:47 Awesome.
Steven LaMarca: 06:47 after so much downtime.
Benji Moses: 06:49 Yep.
Steven LaMarca: 06:50 So of course I want to continue turning brass plates into watch dials and I want to get some more people from outside of AMT on our test bed doing some projects. And there’s a good, good potential for that happening in the future. I’m really excited for that with the new school year happening and such.
Steven LaMarca: 07:10 But to go back to what happened last week, I dropped the old motors on the B table and swapped in some new ones.
Benji Moses: 07:17 Nice.
Steven LaMarca: 07:18 So just to be clear, there are eight in motors on that pocket NC and the B table has two of them.
Benji Moses: 07:24 Okay.
Steven LaMarca: 07:25 So if you remember from last episode I… Well if you remember for like the past six months we’ve been having some issues with the B table. The B table stalls, you’d be rotating it and it would just start stuttering, it would freeze in place and start stuttering and that was from the belt rubbing up on the cover plate and it generates too much friction for the motors to surpass and the B table totally stops the rotation.
Steven LaMarca: 07:52 And the machine, sadly, doesn’t recognize that so it keeps going with every other access.
Benji Moses: 07:58 Right.
Steven LaMarca: 08:00 And then you’d get a scrapped part or a part that needs to be scrapped. After trying some short term fixes and doing a back and forth with [inaudible 00:08:10] multiple times, one of which being trying to work a deal to get the best price possible with upgrading the machine for a good long term fix.
[inaudible 00:08:20] one that we could both agree on was pocket NC sent us some new stepper motors.
Benji Moses: 08:26 Okay.
Steven LaMarca: 08:26 With a revised design on their pulleys because ultimately the belt was slipping off the center of the axis of the pulleys. And so they sent us some new stepper motors because the pulleys are permanently attached to the stepper motors. So you have to do an entire motor replacement. Fortunately all we had to pay for was shipping. Pocket NC is fantastic with customer support, but it did the… last week, did the motor swap.
Benji Moses: 08:53 Right.
Steven LaMarca: 08:54 It was easier than expected.
Benji Moses: 08:56 Okay.
Steven LaMarca: 08:57 Took a little bit of time but not too much time.
Benji Moses: 08:58 Sure.
Steven LaMarca: 08:59 Like I think I set aside the entire morning of Thursday or Wednesday to do this swap and really it only took about, I’d say, I can’t remember, of course. It either took half hour to an hour to do the whole thing from unbolting everything to just start unbolting everything to having everything… the cover plate fully re secured to the machine, which it hasn’t been in the past six months.
Steven LaMarca: 09:28 You know, only like six of the 12 bolts holding the cover plate on or securing it. Now I’ve got all 12 bolts back on because, I don’t have a need to open it up ever again.
Benji Moses: 09:37 It’s not a quick change.
Steven LaMarca: 09:38 It’s not a quick man, it’s not quick change at all.
Benji Moses: 09:41 All right.
Steven LaMarca: 09:42 Have you ever watched like a video of them of a car shop doing an oil change on a Ferrari?
Benji Moses: 09:51 Sure.
Steven LaMarca: 09:51 Everybody’s used to one oil drain plug on a car engine.
Benji Moses: 09:55 Yep.
Steven LaMarca: 09:56 Ferrari’s have like eight.
Benji Moses: 09:57 That’s excessive.
Steven LaMarca: 09:58 There’s eight drain plugs because it pools up in so many areas you have to drain every spot.
Benji Moses: 10:05 And it’s Ferrari.
Steven LaMarca: 10:06 Yeah and it’s a Ferrari.
Benji Moses: 10:06 So, what was your key takeaway of going through that process? What was key thing that you-
Steven LaMarca: 10:10 The key takeaway was it did just about take the entire morning, didn’t quite take the entire morning, but the actual process, the actual motor swap itself… actually wrenching on the machine took half hour to an hour and then the rest of the morning, if you could say, that was all testing.
Benji Moses: 10:30 Okay.
Steven LaMarca: 10:31 To make sure it’s fully functional and everything’s good to go.
Steven LaMarca: 10:34 And because I was, you know, having seen this machine fail on me so many times I wanted to test the hell out of it that. You know, before putting all 12 bolts back on.
Benji Moses: 10:44 That’s super valuable. I was implementing a quick change fixture back at a previous company and it’s one of those where I’d use retention knobs to hold down the base plate.
Steven LaMarca: 10:52 Yeah.
Benji Moses: 10:52 And I thought that it’s said like thousands of pounds of clamping force. I thought, “That’s great cause I just need a one retention knob and one clamp to hold it down.”
Steven LaMarca: 10:59 Right.
Benji Moses: 11:00 As soon as I put it in the a cutter started engaging, it was a big slot cutter and, of course it’s one retention knob does nothing to counteract the torque of it. So the whole fixture just spun around and crashed the entire machine. I was like, Oh what did I do wrong? 11:10If that is enough clapping for us. All right, was it a big dummy that I’d need to, to counter react, I need two retention knob to counteract the testing of manufacturing equipment is fairly important and, being able to do that in a not closed environment so there aren’t significant repercussions. That’s pretty important. Right. I’m glad you’re able to test it.
Steven LaMarca: 11:33 And it also helped me rebuild a perspective if you would, of defining if something’s well-made or not.
Benji Moses: 11:42 Okay.
Steven LaMarca: 11:43 Because you know we like to think that certainly as a car buyer or somebody would like to think that if it never breaks it must be well made
Benji Moses: 11:54 Sure
Steven LaMarca: 11:54 You know but the truth is, what was nice about taking this apart, the machine apart and doing this fix was it’s not really until you open something up and take it apart and then put new components in and put it back together. Can you tell if really well made.
Benji Moses: 12:10 True
Steven LaMarca: 12:11 And it gave me an opportunity or really like taking apart the, that trunnion on the pocket NC really allowed me to see how well made it was and it is a beautifully made machine.
Benji Moses: 12:23 Awesome.
Steven LaMarca: 12:23 Like just the tensioning sliders on the belt, to keep the tension right. When you mount the motor, each motor, cause it’s a dual drive, a table. It actually … you don’t tighten it down right away. You wait until you get the belt on first and then you can adjust the tension further. There are so many ways to adjust the tension, but it’s not excessive.
Benji Moses: 12:47 Sure.
Steven LaMarca: 12:48 And it was just like this is a really well-made machine and they just failed on the pulleys initial design and those pulleys, but other than that, it was great.
Benji Moses: 12:56 That is true, I mean when you say something is well made a lot of people think about it being manufactured properly…
Steven LaMarca: 13:01 Yeah
Benji Moses: 13:01 But also how was the design so you can access and how was the layout? So one of the first cars I had was a Mercury Tracer, similar Ford escort, a wagon, and to change like the spark plugs I had to remove like 30-40 things just to get to the ones [inaudible 00:13:16] it’s longitudal four cylinder [inaudible 00:13:20] why am I doing all this?
Steven LaMarca: 13:22 Yeah.
Benji Moses: 13:22 Well yeah, I completely agree with that. Yeah. This is a little more thought put into things that small.
Steven LaMarca: 13:27 It was really reassuring and the machine as well.
Benji Moses: 13:29 Cool. So I’ve got a couple of articles here. Awesome. First one I want to talk about was this label, the world’s smallest accelerometer points to new era and wearables, comma, gaming. Worst title in the world. But it’s from physics at GORUCK.
Steven LaMarca: 13:42 Yeah, well, Oh my God.
Benji Moses: 13:44 It’s only so much I can give them.
Steven LaMarca: 13:45 Having come from that side of academia, they get a lot worse, man.
Benji Moses: 13:50 Now the takeaway here is two interesting things. One, they’re talking about graphene again, not my favorite topic, but whatever. Also, this is a research from Hagen Germany so, it’s German.
Steven LaMarca: 13:59 Yeah
Benji Moses: 14:01 So they talk about the world’s smallest accelerometer. So in this case they’re talking about sensors getting from, let’s see, they talk about sensors going from micro to nano size. So I think that an order size, magnitude smaller is pretty important takeaway. So the illustration they have, they’ve got some coin here. It’s European coin. I don’t know what size is, how much is worth, but they also have a pen, and this accelerometer is about the size of the ball on the ball point pen.
Steven LaMarca: 14:27 Yeah
Benji Moses: 14:28 That’s pretty strong. So the idea of being able to shrink your accelerometer to that small, kind of opens up a lot of new opportunities for…
Steven LaMarca: 14:36 You can put an accelerometer in anything.
Benji Moses: 14:38 Almost anything, so let’s think about this bar…
Steven LaMarca: 14:40 Or another use case or nothing. Or you can put multiple Excel accelerometers as a redundancy.
Benji Moses: 14:46 Yeah, that’s true.
Steven LaMarca: 14:48 Mostly every computer, and even phone out there has a multi core processor. I remember when the PlayStation three came out and they’re like, it has an eight core or nine core processor, that wasn’t for power. That was for if three of them fail in the manufacturing process, which was very common.
Benji Moses: 15:06 That is true.
Steven LaMarca: 15:07 So that’s awesome. Put an accelerometer in everything and put four of them in there.
Benji Moses: 15:11 Yeah and that’s the thought I was thinking about. That’s the thought process. So the article talks about where I was in gaming, sure that’s a high volume, high marketplace for that. But if you look at that technology, being small and being able to package that into manufacturing space, you could put a bunch of these in fluid. So you can see, you know, where the fluid is, the fluid, if it’s moving around, how buoyant it is, that type of thing. And also if it’s small enough you could put in consumables. If I put it in a cutting tool, that’d be pretty cool too. So that’s something to think about. This is a pretty cool enabling technology that could open the door for a lot of different things as we get into digital manufacturing and be able to want to get more data from a lot of different locations on the machine. So I thought that was pretty interesting. You had something you wanted to walk us through?
Steven LaMarca: 15:55 Yeah, this is a, I picked this article because it actually kind of bothered me. It kind of grind my gears a little bit and it is DSM Royal hat skinning DHV and CLEAD design. Those are companies by the way, 3D printed and FRP pedestrian bridge.
Benji Moses: 16:19 I don’t know anything that you said.
Steven LaMarca: 16:20 Fiber reinforced polymer bridge. They 3D printed a footbridge.
Benji Moses: 16:24 A footbridge, that’s cool.
Steven LaMarca: 16:25 It is 2019, why are we still talking about 3D printing foot bridges? This was cool 10 years ago, back when I was in college. And people are still making foot bridges and acting like it’s a breakthrough thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this community in wherever in Europe really needed a footbridge I guess.
Benji Moses: 16:45 I guess.
Steven LaMarca: 16:46 And why not make it out of … instead of using wood planks and steel beams, let’s 3D print it because we’ve got a million robots.
Benji Moses: 16:52 Make it look organic.
Steven LaMarca: 16:53 Yeah.
Benji Moses: 16:55 So do they still use robots to print the entire thing in sections? So I do remember an article about four years ago, five years ago when I joined a AMT and they were 3D printing a metallic bridge using robots. Now that was kind of interesting a bunch of years ago. But again, it’s back to the problem that additive has. I think it’s the application of it in manufacturing. Sure. That’s kind of cool. Robots had been welding for awhile. It’s …
Steven LaMarca: 17:23 That’s the problem, yet beauty.
Benji Moses: 17:24 Yeah, exactly. So, and that’s what three D printing is on a large scale like that. It’s a scaled up a welding.
Steven LaMarca: 17:30 Yeah. It is.
Benji Moses: 17:31 But on that particular case, what’s the design initiative? What problem are they solving that’s unique that a wooden or a steel structure couldn’t solve? Are they saving material? Did they want to just spend money on a robot? I don’t understand what problem that additive had to solve. Is it saving material? Maybe they don’t want to cut down wood or.. I don’t like that lack of problem[inaudible 00:17:52]
Steven LaMarca: 17:52 What I’m just trying to get at, is we are this far into additive becoming or not becoming, being an actual means of manufacturing and we’re still generating buzz material.
Benji Moses: 18:05 Lot of buzz materials.
Steven LaMarca: 18:06 It’s like stop,
Benji Moses: 18:07 You know what I am excited, for a slight side tangent, is robotics getting to movies. So using robots for as a means to hold a camera. I’ve seen a bunch of articles on how commercials they’ve used. And the cool thing is they’re developing software and visualizations. They understand the position of these cameras so they can, obviously, map out the story from the story board where they want to record. So the tools that they’re developing for this, I think may help our manufacturing community quite a bit. One thing that does scare me a little bit is I don’t think these are collaborative robots and there are humans right next to these robots, I’m a little worried that someone’s going to get hurt.
Steven LaMarca: 18:43 And these robots are huge!
Benji Moses: 18:44 They’re not small. They’re not buying like the cheap ones, like the desktop guy. They’re buying the full scale. Yeah, they’re going Corvette type.
Steven LaMarca: 18:50 You’re right, you’re right. They’re buying industry and they’re not buying collaborative. Now they’re buying industrial and then modding them themselves.
Benji Moses: 18:57 We’ll see how far it goes. I’ll keep an eye on that. The last article I want to talk about is from advanced manufacturing.org and they talk about lightweighting, which probably isn’t the word, but they’re using it, a new phase in lightweighting. So in the automotive they see a significant shift from steels, to more aluminum in their cars and you can see them for Ford commercials a bunch of years ago when they talk about using their military grade aluminum, which is kind of annoying when they depict it that way. And then Chevy was talking about how they’re still using steel and blah, blah blah.
Steven LaMarca: 19:31 Like the M 16 has had an aluminum receiver since the Nam, bro.
Benji Moses: 19:35 So the interesting things that they talk about was the amount of material that they bring in. So they’re shifting to, now they don’t give a baseline, but for automotive capacity for this one, steel aluminum mill, 200 tons for 2020. For aluminum, that’s a large volume of material that they’re going to use. And the real problem that they’re trying to solve is a shift for emissions. So there’s a lot of debate of whether or not emissions will go back to previous standards, but where they’re headed to is trying to meet current emissions, and one of the ways they could do that now is just by reducing the weigh. Just by going to a lighter, stronger materials [inaudible 00:20:13] shifting to aluminum and including some magnesium. And of course you’re still going to have some steel, but only in this key critical area. So they talk about a couple of use cases where FCA saved 66 kilos on one car, just shifting straight to aluminum.
Benji Moses: 20:30 Pacifica minivan, everyone’s favorite minivan, saved 168 pounds on the structure and 250 pounds overall, just from shifting. Then also the article talks about the manufacturing side of it, So if I’ve got a big dye for steel, I’m stamping steel fenders, steel quarter panels, steel structure, shifting to aluminum what do I need to do and the article briefly touches on that, it’s a fairly easy shift. You do have to account for some of the shrink back because they are a little bit different. Maybe the heat processing, depending on the grade of lumina you’re using. But for the most part it’s not as difficult as a lot of people will be concerned about. The article also gets into a little bit of electric vehicles, not in the direction that I want it to, they’re talking about trying to save weight so they can extend the battery range also.
Steven LaMarca: 21:15 Sure. What was the extent that you wanted them to talk about?
Benji Moses: 21:18 More of the impact to manufacturing, so more on the subtractive manufacturing side.
Steven LaMarca: 21:22 Gotcha
Benji Moses: 21:23 So the committee that I manage, I’m the liaison for, the concern that they have since a lot of the membership produces subtractive equipment, especially for automotive. If there is a significant shift to electrification or electrified vehicles…
Steven LaMarca: 21:37 Then there’s going to be less gearboxes…
Benji Moses: 21:38 Less gearboxes, no internal combustion, there still is a need for a gearbox you have to go in reverse. You still have to maybe shift one or two gears. You still have to produce battery compartments and things like that. But the volume of manufacturing is what they’re concerned about. Now that’s a shift purely on cars. What they’re also concerned about is, if they looked at the whole e-mobility trend is, okay, maybe I don’t need a car, they’re thinking more broadly, I don’t buy a car. Or the consumption of cars has gone down where maybe they’re using scooters, maybe they renting bicycles, maybe they’re just Ubering around. So the concept of the internal combustion car as a main method of transportation may actually diminish in the next [inaudible 00:22:22] year. So we’re still discussing that and we’re working through that on the committee level to just understand what the trends are and how to prepare for those trends. So it was an interesting debate that we had.
Steven LaMarca: 22:31 Yeah. Lightweighting is really cool and it’s, engines are getting, for cars going back to automobiles, they’re getting more efficient. Way more efficient, simultaneously by some miracle. Way more powerful too.
Benji Moses: 22:46 I completely forgot about that. So all of a sudden we’re crushing it. Crossing the thousand horsepower engine like every other day now.
Steven LaMarca: 22:54 Yeah, and they’re still meeting emissions requirements.
Benji Moses: 22:57 It’s absurd how powerful as cars have come nowadays. And so the engine that I have on my 135? Is an inline six, I got when I bought it was like 250 horsepower I modified it, get about 300. The M2 competition that you could buy now is what? Three 50 from the dealership? 350 horsepower. That’s a significant change. Now. Mine is pretty old, its a 2008, 10 years. That’s pretty absurd, using basically the same block, basically the same engine. It’s mind blowing, Or mind bottling.
Steven LaMarca: 23:25 How about the, Oh man, Mercedes-Benz, the GLA AMG, the small SUV that has the two liter turbocharged four cylinder that makes like 425? It’s around 400 horsepower, that is 1980s group B rally cars spec and something that has a warranty.
Benji Moses: 23:50 Yep. Yeah, that’s impressive.
Steven LaMarca: 23:53 And it’s crazy, but bringing it back to lightweighting, I want to ask you this and it’s probably not going to get the answer I want to hear because, we were both car nuts and we know what the better years back in the day were like and what is a lightweight car to you? How much does a lightweight car weigh, in pounds, to you?
Benji Moses: 24:15 Like a production car or like a[inaudible 00:24:18] so realistically anything below two thousand eight hundred pounds.
Steven LaMarca: 24:23 Okay yeah, you’re old school. That’s really lightweight, that’s super lightweight.
Benji Moses: 24:27 Super lightweight. It’s hard to achieve you. You’re talking about like significant changes. The material now my car is like thirty-four to thirty-five hundred pounds.
Steven LaMarca: 24:35 Yeah, I feel like in the 90s the average car weighed twenty-nine to thirty-two hundred pounds. And now there’s like, a family car is going to weigh… you’re lucky if like, what was sub 3000 pounds is now sub four thousand pounds.
Benji Moses: 24:55 [inaudible 00:24:55] Yeah, and that’s the dilemma I face right now, so as my car gets older, I’m looking for a replacement. Of course I’m going from a two door coupe to, that’s about three thousand four hundred pounds, to this big giant four door that’s going to probably be four thousand pounds. Now I pray it’s 500 horsepower, but we’ll see what I can swing.
Steven LaMarca: 25:13 Yeah. It is really tough.
Benji Moses: 25:16 And it’s based on the consumer growth too. So that, I think I’ve noticed that one specific model, how they developed it back then, they try and mold it to how that generation has grown and their tastes have to evolve too. So if you look at Subaru and how they evolved their STI, so it’ll start off the super lightweight, so econobox Roadster, another four door with the giant wing, it evolved to a more of a sleek style as the generations become older, increased weight, increase the comfort. So we’ll see. Yeah, interesting times.
Steven LaMarca: 25:46 Fun.
Benji Moses: 25:47 Thanks, this is a great podcast.
Steven LaMarca: 25:49 And thank you, Ben, and thank you, Adam.
Benji Moses: 25:51 Thanks, Adam.
Adam Gambrell: 25:52 You’re welcome.
Benji Moses: 25:53 Bye everybody.
Steven LaMarca: 25:53 Have a good day everybody, bye
Benji Moses: 25:54 Bye
