Sprint

How are Sprinkar shocks made and why are they the most important part on the car? Getting your shocks adjusted just right is a vastly underrated, skillful art that only the best wit In comparison to other forms of motorsport, Sprinkars have long remained very simple mac But with dynamometers and associated software now readily available, competitors now have access to knowing everyt In turn, the standard of shock technology and performance wit The days of buying a shock with a single digit stamped on top and bolting it on your car are long gone. W To show you what's inside a shock and how they're manufactured and all of the effort that goes into them, I needed access. Just that Garrett Andrews, the owner and founder of Competition Suspension Inc, also known as CSI, was kind enough to give me. And I had no idea just how much they actually built, even outside of Sprinkar racing. So we do everything from design to manufacture shock absorbers, all the accessories, b The Sprinkar fan in me geeked out big time because when I walked into their facility, Garrett gave me a personal tour with zero restrictions, all to show you all of the parts and every single step of the process. There's roughly 40 pieces that go inside of a shock. So these are kind of the components that make up a shock absorber. So the main body, this has a mirror So the finish inside that body has to be just perfect. A rod end, there's a handful of parts that go in here. The adjuster knob, there's a check ball and a spring to give you a detent so you can feel the clicks in your shock. The spherical bearing and clip, the rod guide that supports the shaft in the body. So the main shaft and on an adjustable shock, these are always hollow because we have what's called a metering rod that goes inside of that shaft. As you adjust your shock, that metering rod pushes a needle against there's also a compression jet depending on whether we want to adjust compression or rebound or on a double adjustable, it gets a little more complicated. But that needle, we have a variety of different degree ends on it depending on how broad we want the adjustment range to be. So that would go in the shaft and then your jet would go in the shaft. On the shaft would go a piston with a series of s I don't have the s And then a piston nut that would hold that piston tight on the shaft. At the end of the body, it would have a base valve of some sort. So t So we have the base valve, you can see a s And then on top of the base valve would be the divider piston. The divider piston goes inside of the body cap and that keeps the oil and the nitrogen separate from each other inside of the shock. And kind of the last piece is the body cap. So a Schrader valve where you would charge it with nitrogen to a specific pressure, the al So these are kind of all the pieces that would go in a pretty typical monotube shock that's used on a Sprint car. It really is incredible that every single part that he just showed us are all designed and manufactured right there in-house at that CSI factory, w Pretty much everything we make from the body standpoint is al It's lighter, it dissipates heat better. A lot of the internals are made out of al And we have that kind of famous CSI gold coating on the shaft, which is a friction reducer, also hardens the shaft from Just because they can make a nice piece doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to do its job well. That's where these guys really do their work, creating not just valving for their shocks, but doing proper research and development, creating brand new products for the industry. Tuning shocks has evolved so much since we started in 2009. At that time, everybody just took a boxed shock off the shelf and put it on their car and ran with it. Now everyt So each shock package is really custom tailored for the end user. And that's almost all the way down to the local racer now is getting some type of customized shock package for their specific application. As customers are racing throughout the year and we're at races with them supporting, there's times where we identify maybe a certain handling characteristic that we're trying to, a problem we're trying to solve and we need to maybe make the car smoother on a cushion or we feel Then we'll sit down with our engineering team and identify what that part is we need to make. For example, at one point this so we started identifying on the dyno running shocks at different velocities. We have a full data acquisition system. So looking at that data and seeing is there anyt Once we can identify that spot in the shock curve, then we can start to look at how we're going to make a part whether we want to flow more, flow less, more preload in the s However we want to solve that issue and sometimes we have to make the part two or three times to get it exactly how we want on the dyno before we'll even put it on the racetrack and then get driver feedback to see if we've went the right direction and we've solved that issue. The amount of effort that goes into getting a driver comfortable in their race car is truly underappreciated. You can design a part but then you've also got to design or create a way to actually manufacture that part. Braden will then write the program that will go to the mac So you can see he's got the solid model and then he creates tool paths, selects what tools he wants to use to make the part and then it would generate a program. It looks Every line of code is a movement in the mac Basically that code tells the mac Almost 8,000 lines of code just to mac As Garrett told us there's about 40 parts that make up a single shock absorber. It blows my mind to see what all of these parts start out as. No wonder there are 16 people that make up the two s How many shocks do they produce in a year? Well keep watc Once we design the part, wrote the program, we'll identify what material we want to make it out of. Most all of our billet pieces we make out of 7075. T So we'll order in sticks of material, cut them to length. Typically for the lathe we cut them to four foot sections and if it's a bar fed part that's the correct length or even if it's not that's perfectly what'll fit in the back of the mac Yeah we'll just make a bunch of these incredible T CSI has not held back from investing in the best CNC equipment. CNC stands for computer n We have the raw material in the mac The operator has loaded the turret here with all of the tools we need to make the subspender will grab it and then we'll mac We made the investment in these higher end lathes that can do turning milling on both sides because previous to that we would just turn a puck and then take it to our mill and mill the part, flip it, mill the part and every time you have to have another operation there's a chance for a slight inconsistency and in the shock parts the more consistent they are the easier it is for the builders to build the shock and the better it is for the end user because we can make The tuning is a lot more precise because in a shock as I mentioned earlier there's I really did not expect to see t While some external parts are fine to be deburred by hand it's imperative that the internals So this machine is for polishing jewelry and it actually it spins and it's got all these tiny little stainless steel pins that it spins around the part and we use that to deburr all these little holes so the part just comes out and looks Once the parts are made some are sent off to look pretty where they are anodized or coated depending on what they are they'll then come back have final tolerance inspections made and then they'ready for assembly. We have five assembly bays here and really that's because we have like somebody who specializes in building our quarter midget shocks someone who specializes in building our micro shocks our sprint car shocks and then someone who does repairs so we like one shock technician to do the job start to finish so if the guy is building sprint car shocks he'll pull all the parts and build the shock start to finish and then that way he owns the project he's very familiar with it because he's building sprint car shocks every day so this is one of our five bays we try to keep all the tools the guy will need in his bay every bay's got a dyno we use CTW dyno's here and then all of the data is saved to a hard drive and then backed up to the cloud so we always can get shock dyno data for our customers we get often times somebody will buy a used shock and they don't know anything about it we can look up via the serial n CSI builds around about five to six thousand brand new shocks every single year and on top of that they rebuild and service about the same amount that's a lot of tuning. So when you hear somebody talk about the valving inside your shock t If you