One of the Taiwanese manufacturers works on a conversion kit for the VW bus… they’re very serious about it and are in testing fase…

The team of engineers is mind-blowing, hired from a real car manufacturer!

Yours truly was invited for test drive and report…

The performance is impressive and it still drives like a bus, I missed the typical aircooled noise though…

The drive line and suspension is simply state of the art…

Proud to help with this project.

Imagine we might drive our babies the electric way in the near future….

The engineering team was glad to join the banner moment!

Imagine we can drive our babies the electric way in the near future!

With this the 2019 Asia factory tour posts come to an and… work is waiting at BBT HQ, i better rush to home now…:)

Thanks for following my travel posts… hope you like it, comments always welcome in the comment section…:)

On our Asia factory tour we also stopped by Vintage Speed; Custom and Commercial Andy set up to make his own exhaust….from scratch…

Vintage speed is a real cool factory, driven on the passion of its owner Mr MT….

Come on Andy let’s build that exhaust….

Side plates been specially engraved for Andy!

The pressing of the side plates is fairly simple tool and a hand press…

When everything was ready we did a real quick tetris challenge… Andy and all his exhaust components…flat out…:)

Then it really kicked off…. the robot plasma cutting the holes in the inner tubes..

Cone the pipes so they fit in each other.

Making the inner parts for the muffler.

and let the assembly begins!

They roll the flat stainless sheet metal on this machine into a perfect round.

about half way…

Robot TIG welding was fairly impressive.

then the assembly of the inner parts begins…

So Andy will have a cool exhaust on his bus… Thanks to MT and the team of Vintage Speed. It was real cool we could follow the production all way down…

Time for a coffee… a Vintage Speed coffee in style!

The Vintage speed team full force…

Thanks for the wonderful day MT it was another really wunderday in beautiful Taiwan!

We visit the foundry where they cast all tooling… this has to happen somewhere…:)

Shin, Niels and Andy are all ready for it, safety first!

Here the styrofoam is coated and placed in to big steel cages. They fill up the cage with sand and closed to poor liquid metal in.

The styrofoam melts away, and the perfect form of the part stay inside the moulds.

The perfect start to mill out the perfect tooling for the part.

Remember there’s always three tooling necessary; Male, female and overhead. so three castings necessary for every tooling!

The grey parts below are coated styrofoam models…

In close up they look like this…. this is coated styrofoam… ready to go in the cages…

The trees growing here literally out of the restroom….:)

After casting and cleaning, some small parts might be necessary for adjustment, this happens by welding… this is how freshly cast steel moulds do look….

This is an iron pouring bucket. The pouring of liquid metal happens at night only to save on energy costs… sorry we didn’t gave up our sleep to capture that…:)

How they fill the cages up with sand, the styrofoam is already inside…

The tooling are huge as you can compare dimensions with the workers on top of it, these are regular man, no dwarfs…:)

The breaking of the sand from the metal once it comes out of the cages… a pretty dusty work…

Don’t we all like the industrial views of factories brave enough to make our parts? You bet!

We continu our factory visit report tomorrow so stay tuned!!