 Buying quality performance parts for your car is usually pretty expensive and it's not like you get to try it out ahead of time You can talk to your buddies or read reviews and that might make you feel confident about what you're buying But if you could actually see the engineering that goes on behind the scenes that really shows you the quality of the product Luckily, we've got this cool blue Raptor behind me. One of our engineers is working on an intercooler kit right now So let's go check it out. Hey, what's up Chris? What's going on Adam? This is Chris Mitchell. He's one of our mechanical engineers at Cobb So he designs a lot of the parts working on the Raptor today Show me what you're working on So I just got done taking a look at this bypass valve that Ford has integrated into their intercooler and I need to find a way to Basically reproduce what they have here So I'm actually going to take this part and I'm going to bring it in and use this faro arm To scan this so that I can make the female side of it so that we can have that integrated into our intercooler system Is this kind of a unique design? I mean it's bypass valve most turbo car guys know what a bypass valve looks like most of them don't look like that Yeah, what's going on with this one that's different So they just have a different thread pattern It takes like a between a half and a quarter turn to get it to lock in and so we obviously want them to be able to use This on theirs on our kit that we provide as well as an aftermarket one You mentioned using this faro arm earlier these 3d scanners are super cool So it's cool to show customers how you guys use them and what kind of benefits it helps with engineering to Make your job a lot easier. So tell me about it. So this is a 3d scanner and we use it mostly to get Our mounting locations and stuff like that and kind of give ourselves an envelope to work within within solid works So it's a really important tool that we have here and it makes it a lot easier Then just making physically making a part and putting it in finding out it doesn't fit pulling it back out and repeating that process So this reduces the I guess number of iterations that it takes for us to get Something to actually work out. So you can do mock-ups and Pre-prep on the computer before you actually have to physically put anything on the car Exactly, so we can we can get a full image of the open space here in this case And we can pull that up in the computer We can actually pull mounting points that we want to use From there and see them all within Solid works on the computer and use those to model things off of and then we can go into actually prototyping them Rather than doing that repeatedly. What how do you really how do you use it? What's those steps like obviously the short version? I mean, obviously you hook it up to the computer. So there's software. We use geomagic software on there You can actually just scan across your you know, wherever you're working and There's you know, you got to learn how to use it There's a few little things you have to know how to do for first with it But you can essentially just come across and scan the entire Area you're working within And it'll just steadily pull in data from this and you'll have something to work with in no time And as you're scanning you can actually see the the lasers that are picking up the shapes and the dimensions of everything And it's generating it on the computer in real time, right? Exactly And so then you can go back to your desk and you can essentially work on the truck from your desk That is it. Awesome. That is it. What about you've got the mock-up on here We've got our 3d printed in in tanks on the intercooler This is obviously just for fitment, right? This obviously this isn't a core, but What have you got right here? Tell me more about this So after doing a scan with this, I've got an approximate size for the core that I want to use And the end tanks, like you said, they're 3d printed So I was able to put them on there and kind of determine how they were going to fit within there So that I can kind of continue on as you can see I've run into a little bit of a fitment issue here So I'm going to do a little bit more scanning and Pull that into my computer and see if I can model something that's going to actually fit into this vehicle Better than how I have it modeled up right now. What about the intakes itself? They're 3d printed. Do we do how do you guys use that day to day? So 3d printing is obviously Very useful for us. It allows us to quickly produce a part that's to scale very accurate And put it on the vehicle and test it out without having to pay for all the tooling and the costs associated with Actually getting an end tank made or any other part for that matter And it seems like a lot of this is fitment related. Obviously, that's the first step If it doesn't fit, it doesn't matter how well it works But when someone buys a part, they want it to make the car faster So it needs to be more efficient, needs to work What kind of combination of these tools and other things do you use to actually Test performance as opposed to just fitment and looks? So we use the flow simulation add-on within SOLIDWORKS to test out all of the flow characteristics of the end tanks That's how we arrived at least how I arrived at the design for this shape of these end tanks So with that we can actually see the distribution of air coming in from the hot side to the cold side And make sure that it's being distributed evenly across the whole height of the core So seems like you can make good progress so far. What's the next step from where we're at right now? So what I'm going to do next is I've got all my mounting locations fine It looks like that's all going to fit within the grille when the truck is reassembled The issue right now is that the end tanks have some clearance issues with part of the front bumper So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a scan with all this stuff in here right now And give myself something to work from and I'm going to design some in The rest of the end tanks and make sure that they don't run into anything down there And that they've got a clear path to the stock piping within the truck Cool, I guess from there once we know it fits we get an actual core the same size we get some actual Metal end tanks as opposed to these printed ones. They probably wouldn't hold much pressure Then we slap it on and that goes to calibration and they start dinotesting you right exactly that's that is the process Cool. Well, hopefully I gave you guys some insight as to what really goes on behind the scenes There's obviously even more things that happen with different parts, but thanks chris. I'll let you get back to work All right adam later man