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S & S Cycle Company has a need for speed. It produces aftermarket engine products for Harley Davidson and custom motorcycles. Their products keep these bikes fast and reliable on the street and at the drag strip.
For the company’s parts and engines to offer high performance capabilities and stay ahead of the competition on the street and strip, S & S Cycle (Viola, WI) has to take advantage of advanced production technologies. One of these important technologies is state-of-the-art CAD/CAM software that allows them to develop unique racing parts “that they couldn’t produce without it,” said Barry Peterson, prototype R&D CNC machinist.
In the 1950’s S & S Cycle founder, George Smith, had one goal: to make American motorcycles faster. His hobby was racing, and he had some ideas on how to make motorcycles quicker. At the time there were no high-performance aftermarket motorcycle parts. Therefore, Smith decided to design and manufacture his own unique performance parts for Harley Davidson engines. Over the years the company has produced parts that include power kits, carburetor and fuel systems, transmissions, gaskets, seals, valves, heads, and even complete V-twin engines. S & S Cycle soon became the world’s most prestigious manufacturer of aftermarket performance motorcycle engines and parts with many of its engines being used for custom motorcycles.
Today, one of Smith’s sons, George Jr., is focusing his time on racing in the National Hot Rod Association with fellow racer, George Bryce. Their race team does on-track testing and competing with their V-twin motorcycle engines.
To squeeze every bit of horsepower from their engines and to manufacture race-proven parts, S & S Cycle relies on Mastercam (CNC Software, Inc. Tolland, CT) CAD/CAM Mill level 3 with Solids software. Mike Mattera of ShopWare, Inc. keeps S & S Cycle up-to-date on the most cutting-edge developments in Mastercam. This software has allowed the company to design more complex products and parts and machine them faster. In fact, Peterson remarked that some of its parts couldn’t be produced without the capabilities of Mastercam.
“With our Mastercam software and five-axis machining centers, we can make greater enhancements to our engines. With Mastercam we design a part in Solid Modeler. Then we take the model and import it into Mastercam and produce a tool path. This allows us to start out with a block of billet aluminum instead of a casting and make just about any shape we need. By using solid billet material it saves us time with prototypes, because we can skip the casting mold. In some applications, billet parts may have a strength advantage over castings and many customers like the look of billet parts. Machining parts from billet material also has another advantage. We can easily make changes to the part design and produce them quickly, because there’s no need to wait for a mold change. This saves us time and allows us to market products faster.”
For more complex features and surfacing, he said it has significantly reduced their programming time. “Where Mastercam is really making a difference is on very complex surfaces. Also, Mastercam has opened new doors for us. It has allowed us to make complicated parts with complex surfaces that weren’t practical or even possible for us to do before,” he added. |