StanceWorks: Failure is Welcomed – It Makes a Build Better | K24-Swapped Ferrari Revisions

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign My intercooler exploded in the last episode and I wouldn’t have guessed this would make for one of the most viewed episodes of this series so far but here we are now I took a little bit more than a week off as I’m sure most of you have noticed

But even in that week I’ve still been here in the shop hard at work I’ve made progress on the Ferrari on the model A on the Audi and even some on our upcoming E30 project so I’ve got a ton of stuff in store for you guys but today

We are going to build a new intercooler and we’re going to dive into all of the techie and nerdy aspects we’re going to go heavy on the fabrication for this one and I want to spend some time talking about some of the design changes we are going to implement some of the changes

We are not going to implement but first more than anything we’ve got to rewind and let’s talk about why this thing failed in the first place a few weeks back we strapped the Ferrari down to the dyno for the second time only to have the intercooler explode in

Spectacular fashion in fact it happened not once but twice after repairing the top side the bottom blew out and split this thing into several pieces we got the car back over to the Stanford shop and then with the help from some of the stanceworks Discord members We performed

An FEA on our intercooler design to find out why it failed the answer was quite simple I built it out of material that was just too thin in fact our data log showed that it failed exactly where our FEA told us that it would now some commenters in the last episode

Did their best to suggest that this failure was the result of bad welds but the reality is our FEA analysis was done with no welds included that drawing was one contiguous piece of metal the truth is the end tank would have failed even if we had managed to stamp

It from one single piece of aluminum suffice to say that’s why pressure vessels don’t have corners but we’ll get to that a little bit later in the episode our interim solution is to just rebuild this intercooler out of thicker material it’s not necessarily the most elegant solution and in fact one could argue

It’s the brute force method but I’ll elaborate on that as well to rebuild our intercooler I sent all of our CAD files off to our friends at send cut send a few days later this box showed up and inside we’ve got enough material to make two sets of end tanks

Because let’s be honest this is my biggest aluminum welding project to date and there’s a decent chance I messed something up as you can see all of a material this time around is 3 16 of an inch thick or for the rest of the world right at about five millimeters

This material is more than twice as thick as what we used last time at 95 thousands and it will net a significant increase in overall strength now the beauty to using the parts that we designed in Fusion 360 and then had send cut send cut for us is that they

All fit together in one way this forces all of the individual pieces to line up with each other revealing perfectly weldable gaps it would be more or less impossible for us to put this thing together and not have it turn out exactly the same as the cad drawing

But along with our laser-cut puzzle pieces we’re also going to need a new intercooler core of course we could reuse the old one as the CSF core was completely unharmed but I don’t feel like putting in the legwork to cut all of that aluminum apart when

My friends at CSF were more than willing to supply a pair of new ones now as far as why I need a pair again we’ll get there later in the episode but with a new core in hand let’s turn our attention to welding this thing up I

Want to remove the large gas lens that we normally use for steel and stainless in favor of something smaller more suited for aluminum I initially transferred over to an eight and then eventually moved to a five after realizing that was what was best suited for the job From here we’re on to tacking it all together and with any luck we’ll transform a bunch of individual pieces into a fully finished part that hopefully looks like a professional made it but you can make parts that look just like this one too because senkatsen has

Put together a 15 discount code that you can claim at send cutscend.com stanceworks now it probably would have been easier for me to weld this end tank up with it sitting on the workbench but I had major fears of warping so I tacked it down to the core itself to make sure nothing

Moved because I don’t want to get to the end of this and realize it doesn’t fit between the thickness of the material and the amount of heat it’s going to take to burn it in I don’t think there’s any way it wouldn’t have warped As always the most important before actually welding the aluminum is to give it a thorough and deep cleaning we don’t want any contaminants as we actually weld this thing together but now that we’re at this point it’s time to address some of the Thousand comments the last episode got beginning

With it failed at the welds why don’t you get rid of them and just fold these end tanks well ignoring I don’t have a break big enough nor deep enough to actually fold these end tanks properly I want to touch upon what I said earlier with respect to that FEA

The analysis shows the part failing at the corners but we never told the computer that those Corners were welded the computer believes it’s just all one piece of material but it still would have failed there anyway now I do want to be clear about a couple of other things aluminum is typically

Heat treated and unlike steel aluminum welds are usually softer than their parent material because of the annealing process that happens while welding but the FEA performed on our new end tank design with the new thickness shows us that even without any heat treating at all we should be well within the realm

Of safety the real problem is the fact that there are Corners to begin with so I can hear some of you typing already why don’t you get rid of those corners and round the end tanks so you don’t have high pressure stress points honestly that’s a great question and the

Truth is that’s how this should be done if we use a plasma man intake manifold as an example you can see that the plenum portion of it is constructed with a pair of pieces of sheet metal that are rounded over and welded together this reduces those high pressure stress points inside

But to be honest building a set of one-off curved end tanks out of sheet metal would require a ton of work and given that I know in the future we’re going to go with Billet end tanks which is why I have that second core it’s just not worth putting that amount of time

Into hence the Brute Force approach of just making this out of thicker material now back to the fabrication plenty of you guys are probably wondering why there is a huge piece of material overhanging the end of our end tanks and that’s to give me something to attempt to bend this around that last

Corner with but even by using a torch there’s no way I’m bending 3 16 material by hand so we’re gonna need to head over to Brett Walker’s I don’t know by now Brett always has a solution for every problem I bring in and this one began with making a die to bend our material at the proper radius we’ll be bending our end tanks with their five ton Arbor press easily my favorite tool in the shop After a bit of testing and some quote-unquote calibration we got our die sized correctly so that our material would fold along the radius I already had cut on the end tanks what was crucial though is that the band needs to be placed in the exact right

Area there’s no indicator so Brett did a bit of quick math and made a simple jig so we could line everything up correctly by pressing the die into the part you can see it fold along the radius that we’re looking for and most importantly it folds in the correct position not too

Early nor too late and because Brett makes everything easy we just let the roll-in bandsaw cut off the excess material took it back to the shop and it fits so let’s weld it on Foreign We’re not done yet though we’ve still got the water and tanks that we need to fold up and weld into place so let’s take some parts over to the brake and get these folded up properly now yes this brake will bend 316s material and some of you are probably

Saying Mike you just said you couldn’t bend and tanks but if we tried to fold those air side end tanks they would hit the brake before we folded them to the proper point and it wouldn’t work these little guys though they clear just fine They need a little bit of buzzing to clear the welds that I’ve already laid on the intercooler but as you can see everything fits up exactly as it should once again we’ll tack the main portion down to the intercooler and then weld the sides into place and then I’ll need

To order the an bungs that’ll go on the end because well I don’t have them yet now chances are if you made it nine minutes into this video you’re probably already subscribed but if you aren’t and you’re enjoying this episode maybe give it some thought come back and see the

Rest of the progress on this project and support the channel while you’re at it leave a like a comment any support goes a long way foreign with the water tanks welded up we’re left with one final set of parts and that’s the ferrules for our vibrant HD clamps

Now I’ve shown these in the past so feel free to skip forward if you’re familiar with them already but they’ll help me illustrate a point here in a moment if you haven’t seen these before they are an alternative to a silicone coupler but unlike silicone these things can handle

800 PSI of burst pressure 400 degree intake temps and offer several degrees of movement because of this we’re able to sell them out the intercooler without having to worry about the movement of the engine putting stress on our fancy new end tanks not to mention these clamps don’t

Require any tools to install or remove which makes servicing the engine a whole lot simpler than dealing with hose clamps as for why any of this is really relevant well some of you astoundingly pointed out that the clamps on my Turbo were rotating during my last Dyno pull

But rest assured this is totally normal and has nothing to do with wire intercooler failed but we do need to get these new collars welded onto our intercoolers so that we can attach it to our HD clamps and put our charge piping back in the car although I am waiting on the materials

To build one more Mount so we can actually bolt it into the car but with that said this thing is finally done and getting to take a step back from it I gotta say I’m really really proud of it if you’ve been watching this series for long enough you know that

When we started this Ferrari project I hadn’t TIG welded anything before and I’m not going to suggest that this thing is anywhere close to perfect I’m sure the tig Pros can actually point out quite a bit that needs Improvement but I’ve got to say I can so clearly see how

Much progress I’ve made and it makes me that much more excited to sit down and weld every single time some of you may even remember that I didn’t weld the last intercooler I had my buddy Dan do it because I knew this thing would sit front and center in the

Car and I didn’t want my welds to be an eyesore but this time around honestly I’m actually proud to show this thing off at least in some capacity because I know I made it and it represents all of the progress I’ve made so far now let’s just hope it actually holds up

So we’ve got our intercooler done unfortunately it’s not in the car yet obviously I’m still waiting on our top mount as said in the next episode we will get it in the car I might have to remake one of the charge pipes and then

We will go back over to the dyno and see what breaks next that is the next step the next episode for the Ferrari so hopefully within the next week two weeks tops got lots of other stuff to work on in the meantime but on that note and of

Course anybody that actually knows the answer to this question hasn’t made it this far in the episode you’ve already left as soon as I popped up on camera but lots of people keep asking is this build ever going to be done are you ever going to drive it on track why aren’t

You doing that whatever whatever well I feel like it’s kind of obvious but I can’t drive it on track until it’s actually tuned we got to make sure we don’t just pop the engine and there’s a lot of steps that I want to take before

I actually put it on track where I make sure that this car really is ready for prime time so to speak I want to make sure that I’m not pushing it out there too quick then I’m not going to damage the car I’m not going to hurt myself I

Want to make sure that this thing is safe and that it’s not going to come apart this is a very dangerous game to play and I want to be as cautious as I can about it especially given uh things don’t always work out if you aren’t cautious so

To answer that yeah it’ll get done be patient we’ll get there be patient or don’t I don’t know come back when you see a thumbnail of the car on track and you’ll see it then deal with it anyways I appreciate the support I’ve got new Apparel in the works it’s on the way

I’ll have it in a handful of weeks I hope you guys dig it head to the stanceworks Discord check it out join the community and I’ll catch you guys in the next episode