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Back in the day, we had one coil
to bar machine working a couple of weeks each month making carburetor shaft
stock to sell to screw machine shops like yours - and so did most of our
competitors.
Carburetors
were the way we metered gas/air mixture back in the...Oh never mind.
And another running a few days a
month making the hex steel for the fuel line nut that attached the fuel line to
the carburetor.
With the advent of the computer
chip, it seems like a lot of screw machine products disappeared, like parts for
mechanical calculators, adding machines and cash registers.
With the upgrading of
automotive technology, it seems that a lot of those fuel system parts also went
"Bye-Bye"- throttle and butterfly shafts, linkage parts, and fuel nuts come to
my mind. Goodbye carburetors, hello fuel injection. Hello anti-lock brakes.
Hello airbag parts…
The claims of these
changes killing the machined parts industry have been proven to be wrong. We're making higher precision, higher
complexity components to make up for those lost parts.
But when my son and I visited a
local street rod show over the weekend, I saw a lot of nice looking carburetion
systems under a lot of very nice hoods.
I remembered knowing what the
tricks were to make the steel remain straight even after the flats for
the choke plate were milled in to it. (Hint it had nothing to do with the
straightener.)
Then I asked myself, "Who is
making today's street rod, aftermarket and high performance carburetor parts?"
I sure saw a lot at the
street rod show. And I know a lot of very talented machinists out there…
Is going "Back to the future"
a viable way of mining your capabilities in light of today's very
fragmented markets and lower volumes?
I'm thinking it is a profitable
idea to consider.
Editor's Note: CR4 would like to thank Milo for sharing this blog entry, which originally appeared here.
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Re: Are You Making Carburetor Parts?
