We've got bigger, I don't know if SF finally did ever get their 15000 ton press

This incident actually made me a committed Brexiteer because "EU rules" conspired to kill it off (A well known steel competitor was going to complain to the EU so the deal got kyboshed)

**LINK**

Aha! they got a loan from the MOD and bought a 13,000 ton one from ebay Japan

https://www.thestar.co.uk/business/forgemasters-spends-ps120m-on-new-press-in-one-of-largest-investments-in-steelmaking-in-sheffield-3206219

Edited By Ady1 on 12/04/2023 16:46:06

Watching the "big press for Tesla" video, I noticed that he kept talking about "casting". To me, that means pouring or injecting something more-or-less fluid into a mould, letting it harden, then releasing. I appreciate that injection moulding in particular needs a lot of force to hold die components together during the injection process due to pressures involved. I had a trip recently around a local injection-moulding factory where they also make the moulds and was surprised at just how robust the moulds were for relatively small plastic crates.

However, my impression was that the "Tesla" press and manufacturing process was more akin to forging, maybe in just one big shove rather than by multiple hammer blows, and there was no sight of the kinds of things you would expect to see in a foundry for handling hot metal. Are these "castings" actually one-piece forgings, made by squashing (to use a technical term…) a suitable blank, cold, into a set of dies?

My background does not include this kind of manufacturing, but I'm interested to know how the big boys do it!

He's obviously smarter than most of us for these things but if I was a billionaire investor I would be looking at 3D printing as the main future for major product manufacture, especially since you can integrate CAD into it as a real time option

The bodyshell only needs to be recyclable

It is a very interesting process. The original Tesla is apparently not that well designed in terms of the large number of panels needed to be cut and assembled together. So this could be a major saving in the long run – both for assembly time and cost.

As for crash repairs, surely parts can be cut out and new sections welded in, as they are today? Or in a bad case; just buy a whole new front casting, paint it while it is bare, then remove the old front and its components; bolt the new front onto the car, and move the components over into the new section. This would probably be comparable to what happens now, and a lot of time saved on masking up. And of course in a BEV, there are far fewer components in the 'engine' bay so it will be a pretty quick process.

Not sure why a one piece casting will be worse for corrosion than one made out of parts welded together? And does road salt attack aluminium as badly as steel?

Jet engines for carrier borne planes used different alloys in my day. This was because of the salt. I think they had more magnesium, but that's memory from 50 years ago. Having said that, the ally bits on Land Rovers were only a problem where they attached to steel. One or other would rot because of bimetallic corrosion. There was a brisk trade in door tops for series 1.

One of my civil engineering books covers foundations. The easiest answer is to dig down to bedrock, or sink piles down to bedrock and put a platform or grid on top of the piles. The platform can be well below ground level.

Where there is no satisfactory bedrock, they calculate the load on the basis that the ground is a liquid (after measuring the density at various depths) and then the structure is floated on it as if it were a ship. Lots of careful calculation needed. Yes it does go wrong, usually because the ground is stiffer on one side than the other, allowing the structure to tilt.

Even a modest skyscraper is heavier than an 18000 ton press.

Dave