All Day Every Day.........
Before we go down this road of SINCO..... I do want to say even though I founded this company it takes a team of guys to make Sinco what it is today. Without all my staff we wouldn't be able to get out the work we do and keep up the standard of workmanship and service that we strive to maintain. Big thanks to Larry, Alex S and Alex M for all your guys hard work and for sticking by my side!! I also need to say thanks to my wife Ann-Marie without her by my side it would not be at the stage it is today.
Here we go.......Up at the crack of dawn 6 days a week for the last 15 years. This blog is a personal view on what it takes to run Sinco. Every morning straight into welding, managing, arranging parts/stock & jobs, staff/training trying to juggle multiple manifolds at any one time. This is not including the shop jobs(cars), walk-in customers and repair work - add a cnc milling machine that needs to run at least 20 hours a week to keep up with the flanges and you have a pretty crazy ride. All anybody has really seen up until this point are the glory shots that we take and that i allow to be viewed on social media.
Behind the helmet
It takes alot of focus to spend hours upon hours behind your welding helmet when you have so much else that you also need to be doing, I would spend on average 60% of my day welding. The steampipe manifolds are quick and can smash them out, the stainless edition take a bit more time but you can still get good penetration going and then walk it around the pipe. The burn edition is a time consuming weld!!! On a 1 1/4" pipe one weld will take up to 8-10 minutes.
Welding is an art and i am still perfecting my techniques after 20 years of feeding wire into the light.......
Running The Machine
CNC machining flanges.........never thought when I first started out that we would go down that road. Laser cut were so cheap to buy and for a solid 10-12 years we use to get them cut as outwork from another company. I still remember clearly at the start hand tapping turbo flanges, but as the quantities grew hand tapping was just insane so we stepped it up to a gear head drill press with a tapping head. This was a lot better and more accurate but still over time relied on someone (Taylor) to stand there manually loading and unloading. We had this setup for around 3-4 years but once again the quantities kept growing and needed the man power on other jobs and prepping work.
So the main reason for stepping it up to Machine Life was when I met Nic Tauroa. Nic called in one day to our workshop and introduced some other products that he had been working on and over the next few months we got to know each other better. This led into Nic talking alot about his experience in 5 axis CNC machining, programming and training. I want to say a massive thanks to Nic for teaching me everything!! Before going down this path I knew nothing about CNC programming or machining. I had a bit of experience with autocad (lol) from back in the day of polytech doing block courses for my trade. This helped a bit but was a full on 3 months of learning and getting my head around it all.
We now in house design & machine the flanges and the fixtures themselves, we had a bit of a head start as I already had all the dxf files for all our flanges on file from 10+years of them being laser cut so this helped alot.
We now have full control of the flanges within fusion and can alter outer profile shape, port sizes, and sealing area etc.
The CNC flanges not only have perfect threads now that are tight and straight but machining them saves us alot of time cleaning up the edges and linishing off the mill scale before welding. This was a time consuming process we had to do on each one when they were laser cut.
Bit of history with some of the more extreme jobs from over the years.....
These pictures that I will post here are few of the bigger jobs that did my head in!!! While still managing the workshop and doing all the day to day tasks, somehow I still found time to spend hundreds of hours designing/developing & fabricating these setups, I learnt immense amounts from doing these, and now apply this knowledge into everything that comes out of the shop!!
Twin Turbo XR8
This was a tight one had to go to extreme lengths to fit 3" downpipes in there with full tubular turbo manifolds. Alot of hours, every part of this all custom.
Rx3 20b Turbo
Yet again crazy amount of hours getting everything to fit and work, all custom
Twin Turbo V8 Ute
What can I say......hundreds of hours once again
Falcon Stainless Headers
These don't look like much but man the stress and hours these took was insane!! was so tight and pulling off the lengths and x3 steps in size and in stainless.......these were also all individual runners so you could get them in and out without pulling the motor.
S15 RB28
Lol.....started out as a simple turbo manifold job wish i had some photos of it before we started, turned into the most extreme job I have taken on. Did have a gtx35r that was doing 500kw but now has a gtx42 with nos and a 6 speed hollinger box.
