With the current demand for exhausts to be made from exotic materials such as Inconel and Titanium and the constant development of engines leading to ever changing exhaust pipe diameters, Primary Designs now has one of the most comprehensive ranges of tube bender tooling in the motorsport industry.
Tube Manufacturing
Before the days of Inconel, exhausts were mainly made from Stainless Steel which was readily available in tube form and could be cut to length and put straight into the tube bender. Nowadays with the use of ever evolving super alloys such as Inconel and their availability being limited to sheet metal form, Primary Designs has had to develop its own bespoke precision tube manufacturing process.
The Process
Our in-house tube manufacturing processes are to the highest standard where tight tolerances are extremely important, which is essential for producing high-quality bends from thin wall tube.
Each tube is carefully formed using bespoke tube forming tooling developed by Primary Designs, this allows us to produce an almost infinite range of sizes. After forming the tube is then TIG welded on one of our two German made Schnelldorfer semi-automatic precision seam welding machines by one of our tube manufacturing specialists.
Tube Bending
Over the years Primary Designs have become experts in bending thin wall tube and have become well known in the motorsport industry for our specialist tube bending services. With tooling for tube sizes ranging from Ø19.05mm to Ø82.55mm on an extensive range of centre line radiuses (CLR) and wall thicknesses from 0.5mm up to 1.6mm we can cater for almost every exhaust application.
The ability to make our own tube not only ensures accuracy for the perfect bend but also allows us to create bends in a wide range of materials including:
- Stainless Steel 304, 316 and 321
- Inconel 625 and 718
- Titanium Alloys
- Aluminium
Our tube bender is a custom built electric-hydraulic 2-axis CNC mandrel tube bending machine, which has be designed and re-engineered in conjunction with Primary Designs to enable precision, wrinkle free bending of thin walled tube, a process that was once deemed impossible in the sizes we bend, whilst ensuring that material thinning on the outside of the bend it kept to a minimum and overall material thickness is kept with in aerospace tolerances.
Accountability
Every bend we produce goes through a visual inspection from our NDT department, once cleared they are then in accordance with IS0 9001:2008, labelled with an information sticker containing the part number, size, material certificate number and a job number which most importantly ties back to the individual job, inspection report and even the material supplier allowing full traceability and accountability for every bend produced.