Gadgetory

moving faster everything to us it's all about speed to market imagine for the market is this wide-open pie that nobody's had a slice of yet first person there gets the whole pie that's the goal Mishimoto is the world leader in a free market performance cooling products or the automotive diesel truck motocross and ATV markets we specialize in pulling products like radiators coolant hoses fan trout's intercoolers upgraded cooling is really important for people who are taking their car or their truck to the track automotive enthusiasts my name is Steve Wiley I'm a product engineer here at Nishimoto automotive and my job is to take a project from concept to reality before we had a 3d printer the way that we could really do it was by using either cardboard or sheet metal and piecing together as adequate of a prototype as we possibly could a lot of times that fell short because you can't simulate complex geometry with basic sheet metal parts this is what you get with a stock intercooler plastic gun tanks and the tube in thin core from the initial stock one we made a rough prototype using wood for the core and then we 3d printed the N tanks the important thing here is that we're able to test fit this on the car make sure that our dimensions are exactly correct we were then able to go straight to production with this type of bar and plate intercooler we saved at least five or six weeks of mass production time and we were able to get this product to market that much faster instead of having to wait for a factory to make one now I just can simply take apart and send it right to the printer and while it's working I can also be working so it's kind of like having an extra set of hands to do the job for me we chose the z18 because there were different color options that we could choose for printing the printing time was really fast the consumables were really inexpensive and the build plate size was a lot bigger many times the silicon piece is larger than eight inches by having the 18 inch build height and the larger build plate we're then able to just take that and print it as one solid model which gives us the confidence that we have a full accurate representation of what the factory is going to produce when I first started it might have taken us two years in some cases to develop and bring a product to market where we are today we're a fraction of that a lot of that through the tools that we've brought on site to help us with it such as 3d printing such as some of the actual physical mechanical tools that we have for manipulating materials so let's just through the test equipment that we have at Mishimoto five years from now I guess is having a wall of 3d printers and at expanding with the business because it will continue to allow us to get the market faster