Reverse Engineering KRX Bumpers

Article:

Class 1 Motorsports specializes in turning your KRX1000 into a badass race or play machine. Read along to see how we helped speed up their manufacturing process on a few of their products.

In this post we're going to talk about how we took their custom/manually fabricated front and rear bumpers and turned them into a mass producible product using CNC laser and forming equipment. 

But first, lets discuss why CNC manufacturing is a great thing to consider when manufacturing your product.

• When manually building a product such as a bumper, it takes a highly skilled fabricator and lots of time to accurately measure, assemble, and weld out the final product. While Class 1 Motorsports is definitely NOT lacking in the skilled fabricator department, that time and talent could be put towards more efficient tasks to excel the business. CNC machines take out the tedious work of manually cutting/coping/bending tubes or running a flat piece of sheet metal through a band saw and trying to form it accurately. With CNC cut and formed pieces, the fabricator only needs to put the puzzle pieces together and then use their welding talent to lay some sexy dimes (something C1M obviously knows well), cutting time to final product by a fraction of the original time. 
• Customers don't like long lead times, and business owners don't like having tons of product sitting on shelves where crucial capital is tied up that could be used to help the business progress in other areas. This is where CNC manufacturing can speed up your time to final product and allows you to keep a small amount of stocked product that is quickly replenished, or keep lead times to a minimum. 

Now lets jump into where Revv Engineering comes into the process!

Daniel, owner of Class 1 Motorsports, reached out to us with a tight deadline. Like same day type of deadline. He had a bumper built on a racecar that was to be leaving his shop the next day to go racing. We were able to make a plan to get it 3D scanned before it left their shop. I was able to get over to their shop in Fallon Nevada, where I met Daniel and their team. They were super great guys and I wouldn't hesitate to bring a motorsports vehicle to them for work. Their quality speaks for itself. 

 3D SCANNING MANUALLY FABRICATED REAR BUMPER

While I was at the C1M shop, I scanned their KRX race rear bumper and their KRX play front bumper. We devised a plan to reverse engineer these two bumpers with minor modifications to improve manufacturability and aesthetics, along with designing an additional variation for each bumper (a play style rear, and a race style front).

The next step was to bring the final scans into our post processing software and make the data usable in a standard CAD software. This includes defining cylinders for tubes, and planes for sheet metal surfaces or mounting points. This step must be done before you're able to go from a scan (mesh file) to a manufacturable solid body in CAD. 

  REVERSE ENGINEERING EXISTING BUMPERS

After the post processing step, we bring the scans and defined entities into Solidworks, we turn the cylinders and planes into a their solid body type (either sheet metal or a tube). Then make all the necessary cutting, coping, or formed features, along with the other modifications we discussed. Tab and slots (or keys) are added where applicable to help with self locating components in relation to each other. 

DESIGNING PRODUCT VARIATIONS

BUMPER FIXTURES