V8 Cylinder Block and
Crankshaft for Chrysler

Background

Chrysler has a long-standing relationship with Cifunsa in Saltillo, Mexico for manufacture of iron cylinder blocks due to their excellent quality and competitive prices. When Chrysler needed a new V8 cylinder block, NPL-Ditemsa was selected to manufacture all the tooling.
The prototype tooling was required in just 11 weeks and would be followed by production tooling once Chrysler had approved the first sample castings.

Compressed Timing

To compress timing, a route was proposed where the prototype cavities were machined in urethane but mounted in full production core box rigs. It was then possible to quickly replace the urethane cavities by steel, production ones without having to make any other changes to the tooling.

NPL-Ditemsa carried out all the tasks from receipt of CAD data to delivery of the final tool and employed all the latest technology:

	High speed machining for the 3D cavities.
	All toolpaths prepared in PowerMILL with full collision checking.
	All components inspected on the new Brown & Sharpe CNC CMM.

The result was top class prototype tooling, meeting all the quality requirements, delivered on-time!

Production Tools
At the same time, NPL-Ditemsa was also making its third set of production tooling for another variant of this cylinder block. This comprised 6 production core box rigs, all with multiple impressions, and a set of patterns. The high speed machines were instrumental in enabling us to deliver some core boxes up to one month early.