By any measure, John Force Racing’s domination of Funny Car drag racing over the last quarter century is unrivaled.
Force American Made employs 24 out of JFR’s approximately 100 employees. The seven machine shop employees operate the team’s 17 CNC machines, and recent additions to the fleet include a 3-axis VMX30 , a 5-axis VMX42SRT, a 3-axis VMX6030, a TMX8MYS mill turn slant-bed lathe and two TMM8 slant-bed lathes with live tooling.
FAM manufactures tens of thousands of parts per year that range from small consumable parts to super chargers, engine blocks and cylinder heads. Approximately 90% are 7075 and 7050 aluminum, and the other 10% are Titanium Grade 9 (6AL4V).
When the then Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing team moved to their new headquarters in the heart of Speedway, Indiana, the idea of expanding their machining capabilities became viable. Hurco has been a proud sponsor of the team ever since.
At that time, the lead machinist at Ed Carpenter Racing had years of machining experience on manual machines, but hadn't used CNC machines. The Hurco control's conversational programming made the transition easy because it uses a machinist's language and walks users through the process. ECR now has a VMX42HSRTi mill and a TM10Mi lathe at their machine shop.
Hurco is a proud sponsor of Innovators West, the Salina, Kansas, race team famous for its harmonic balancers and vibration dampeners. The decorated team makes its parts for street and race vehicles with a fleet of Hurco machines: two TM12 lathes, two VM10 mills, one VMX64 mill and a TMX8MYS lathe.
The mill turn lathe has significantly improved productivity, according to Brad Waddle. “With the TMX8MYS, production time has been reduced significantly due to the elimination of multiple setups. Instead of three to four operations, these parts can be fully machined in one operation,” said Waddle. “This multiaxis machine with live tooling is able to perform the same processes that previously took three lathe operations and one mill operation - plus we are now able to engrave the numbers in the OD of the case. The operator can load the material, hit ‘go,’ and go back to running another machine. The machine runs nearly unattended for 8+ hours a day.”
