To boost horsepower and set speed and horsepower shootout records, R&R Cycle gives motorcycle engines the ability to breath deep. However, to do this, requires unique manufacturing equipment and software.
To develop unique components and engines, and get the most horsepower out of them, the company uses advanced flow testing for heads and dynamometers for testing their engines. Another important tool is Mastercam CAD/CAM software which doesn’t limit the company’s ability to develop these products. Ronzello says, “Our business was literally grown by Mastercam, and as Mastercam has advanced, we have grown. Mastercam’s capabilities are always advancing, letting our business grow by allowing us to produce parts that keep us ahead of our competitors.”
R&R cycle wanted to use 5-axis equipment to do their most important work – the modification of cylinder heads and porting to allow them to “breath” better, which increases horsepower. To modify their engines they would hand-port heads to get them closer to the perfect shape for proper airflow. The core could shift, causing them to have irregular shape. It could take them 12 hours to do welding, porting, and testing of the heads. So, they bought Mastercam to develop fast and efficient programs for porting. With Mastercam, they could go in and make every port identical on the machining center.
R&R worked with Brian Semprebon, at CNC Software to get the software and their hardware up to speed. R&R says that Semprebon is one of the reasons they are a leader in the V-Twin field of head porting.
Ronzello said they would scan a hand-ported head to develop a program. They would use Mastercam to produce a surface from that. “To produce a port and a specific surface was difficult because we couldn’t reach through the whole port with the cutter,” he added. “So, we would do half of it from the manifold side and half of it from the combustion chamber side. Mastercam allows us to control the angle of approach all the way through the port at every move.” With Mastercam’s ability, it gave R&R a much smoother and better port then they could ever do before. “The most important thing with Mastercam’s technology is that we can port and have the port come up accurately.”
“Machining with Mastercam is much faster now, because we can control the step-overs. We don’t have to worry about gouging because we can literally watch what it’s doing on the computer before actual machining. We can clean up any surfacing problems too,” says Ronzello.
Mastercam has allowed R&R to be more exacting in developing their algorithms that ultimately insure a more accurate port design. Because of their sophisticated algorithms, R&R designs their ports instead of reverse engineering them. |