Motorcycle mania

I was watching the latest motorcycle show on Discovery channel, Jesse James is making motorcycle wheels from solid blocks of 6061 on a Haas CNC machine. He claims it takes a week of machine run time to mill out one wheel.

Why would someone want to mill to OD dimensions of a wheel with an endmill is beyond me. He would be better off bandsawing the blank on a DOALL vertical bandsaw with a circle cutting attachment, and then turning the blank on a lathe, CNC or otherwise.

He could then put the piece on the fancy mill and mill the interior dimensions.

I think he needs a good methods engineer.

Tony

Reply to
Tony
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The machine is beautiful, and I think that it could be used to make some incredible bike parts. In fact, he could probably make a small fortune selling time on that thing doing contract work. It is more than you would need to make a typical rim, and I dont really see the need for using billet for everything. I think that it's a huge waste of time.

But - the possibilities are amazing. I hope that he gets as good with CNC as he seems to be with the English wheel.

Reply to
Joe

yeah , I thought that they were being quite "time wasteful" especially with that brand new haas vtl , but when you can command 200k per bike and 100k for commodity bikes built in your shop you can get away with a lot

not many Chinese bike builders yet

what they didn't make clear in the show was that this was filmed about 24 months ago on average according to haas he got the very first one of those machines

Reply to
williamhenry

Yet, in other shows about custom wheels, using the same machine, the operator said it was 3 hours from start to finish for the most complicated wheels.

Reply to
Simon Jester

He's on the front of the learning curve??

Reply to
Tm

in the other shows they are using a regular vmc to machine wheel blanks, I.e. already formed and welded wheels that just need the cosmetic features machined

the wheels he is building on the vtl are machined complete from on slab of aluminum , costing about 2000 just for the raw material for a front wheel ,

way overkill nobody in their right mind would do it that way but he does , and gets 50,000 a set for one front and one rear

they use a dedicated cam program that is for wheel makers , I forget the name at the moment , but haas covered it in one of their fliers

Reply to
williamhenry

I don't see it taking a week to CNC out a wheel! Greg

Reply to
Greg O

read all about it:

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walt

Reply to
wallster

He started with a 2" x 2" slab for g_d's sakes. You could save a lot of time just by starting with round stock.

I dont think that using CNC is justified unless the job dictates, and the wheels he made could have been just as easily cast in less time - and some are.

But, when you consider the potential design capabilities of a machine like that, - I think that he needs to get some tatoo artists in his shop and teach them how to use CAD. He has the machine capability to make some real museum pieces.

Reply to
Joe

We just had a lengthy discussion about this on alt.machines.cnc. See "Billet wheels" and "Billets, revisited" if you're interested. 'Lots of invective in there. It's amazing what can turn into a flame war.

Jesse James does it that way because he wants to. It is a prohibitively expensive way to make a wheel. It also is NOT the way to build the strongest wheel.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

If you're speaking of Jesse James of West Coast Choppers, his businesses bring in $6 million/year. He has his own engineer/programmer to design the wheels for structural integrity, and to program the Haas.

There is no sensible reason in the world to machine a wheel from a cube of

6061 rolled plate (it's not billet; aluminum billet of that size is a raw, gummy casting that would be miserable to machine), except that you want to.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Except for West Coast Choppers and possibly one other maker, no one else machines them from solid chunks of plate. Even Jesse James has several outfits making wheels under contract, and they're all from forgings.

Forgings and castings are quite close to net-shape. They can be machined much more quickly.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

---------------- "Nobody in the world makes solid billet wheels," Warth continues, "because of the cost. They're incredibly expensive before we even start."

At the time, West Coast Choppers didn't have the machining capability to turn the large chunks of aluminum, so they had to send the material to an outside shop for the lathe work. The results were disastrous.

"We started with two sets of material, enough for front and rear wheels for two bikes, and they messed both the front wheels up, and they didn't tell us," says Warth. "They blew the lathe work, and then laid this weld bead all the way around and re-machined it. When we had the wheels anodized, it showed up."

Considering the wheels were for a prototype concept bike for Honda, Jesse was not pleased. He told Warth to find a machine that would allow them to do the wheels completely in-house.

------------------

Seems like you could make the wheels any damn way you pleased, weld anywhere you want, do whatever, and then just plate the damn thing with aluminum to get a uniform surface for anodizing. You could even polish the aluminum, plate with titanium or something else and THEN anodize.

The machine he has is more suited for making dies than production runs. Hell, if I had one unit like that I'd open up a tool and die business. I'f he'd make some casting dies and start doing some volume he'd probably start making more off parts that T-shirts for once.

Reply to
Joe

From what I remember reading in a cycle magazine recently, the "billets" are actually forgings, coined from a solid slug. The reason they waste all that extra metal is that the word billet has a magical mystique to the biker world. In the mags you can see parts that are obviously castings being sold as "billet" 'cause people will pay more for it....

Reply to
gene lewis

Or one of your customers wants you to and has way more money than they need (:

Reply to
Jim Stewart

I agree with you, I laughed at the TV when I saw them doing that. But - I guess it worked "for him".

But I think I need some clarification on what you mean by billet. I typically consider billet to anything which is extruded or rolled to some degree, as opposed to a casting. This adds strength to the material. Basically, billet is just hot/cold-roll-forged stock - forged by extruding or rolling to some degree. Not really needed in most of the applications where it's employed if you ask me - overkill due to sales hype.

Machining cast aluminum could be easier due to porosity which is not present in billet. - but I definately agree, that is the last way I'd do it. Etching with H2SO4 would be faster !! And cheaper !

Reply to
Joe

And what a joke it is ! - Nobody ever used much aluminum "billet" for anything until they were told that they needed it, or that it's better for some reason.

Almost all aluminum parts were cast until CNC came along. The added strength of billet is not really needed in most situations.

Reply to
Joe

This is what prompted the discussion in alt.machines.cnc. The word "billet" has a specific meaning in steelmaking: it's a square or low-aspect rectangle of more than 4 square inches in cross section and less than 64, an intermediate product in the making of flat bar and round bar, wire rod, and structural shapes. Billets often are made with rounded corners. Smallish quantities of billet are sold as-is, and custom and low-volume high-performance crankshafts and camshafts have been machined from it for years. The makers of these things often use a very high-grade alloy to make up for the small sacrifice they give up for not using forgings.

In aluminum, "billet" has two meanings. One is similar to the one for steel. Those rolled squares, made from aluminum slab, are used to make the very highest-quality rolled bar and structural shapes.

The other meaning in aluminum is round- or square-section castings made for extrusion, ordinary-quality rolled shapes, and forging. They're also called "logs," or "extrusion logs," (they look like logs) and they're commonly available in diameters up to 18 in. -- 28 or 30 in. at the extreme.

These are the starting stock for most aluminum rolled and extruded shapes. They're also the stock from which slugs are cut and forged to make complete car and motorcycle wheels (one-piece wheels); combined webs and hubs, for two-piece wheels; and separate webs and hubs, for three-piece wheels. The rims of these multi-piece wheels generally start as a forged ring, which is spun into shape. Hubs and hub/web combinations are sometimes milled out of plate.

ALL of these components are hot- or cold-worked at some point in their manufacture, either by forging or by rolling into plate or bar, which refines their grain and produces some directional strength in the direction of working. In combination with heat-treatment, it also makes them practical to machine. The raw billets are miserable to machine. Unlike an aluminum diecasting, for example, the areas you would machine from a billet are not chilled; quick chilling makes the grain much finer and the aluminum stronger.

Once a slug is forged from a billet, it is no longer "billet." It's a raw forging. Once a plate or bar is rolled from a billet, it is no longer "billet." It is hot- or cold-rolled wrought stock. Both the rolled and the forged materials are called "wrought," and they comprise a different group of alloys from the aluminum grades made for casting.

Because billet cranks and cams are associated with quality, the term "billet" now seems to be applied to everything in the motorhead world that's made out of a solid piece of stock, steel or aluminum. When you see the term "billet" wheel, there's only one thing you can be sure it's NOT made of: aluminum billet.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I explained the term "billet" in another message in this thread, but your understanding is the common one among motorheads. It's been applied to almost any solid stock, for marketing purposes. It has a specific meaning to primary metals-producers: steelmakers and primary aluminum-makers.

Machining aluminum castings is easier because the casting alloys are made for casting, and because most of the aluminum castings we encounter, unless we make them ourselves, are cast in metal molds. That gives them a finer grain, particularly near the surface, where most machining is done on castings.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Yes.

I like to look through the Harley magazines, and I chuckle a bit at the very loosely defined usage of the word. It's similar in the body jewelry business, everything is referred to as "surgical stainless steel", when really there's no such animal, or "Implant grade", while the seller often has never even _heard of_ the ASTM, or knows anything about metallurgy at all. For instance, according to the APP (assoc. of professional piercers) only 2 materials are acceptable for body jewelry in a new piercing: 316LVM grade 138, and Titanium 6Al4V ELI. However, ASTM lists many different alloys of SS, at least 5 grades and alloys of Ti, along with elemental metals (tantalum) , several plastics, glues and epoxies ALL acceptable for permanent surgical implantation. Gives me a giggle.

Aint it nice being smarter than everyone else? ;-)

Gene

Reply to
gene lewis

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