Tesla’s Insane Giga Press (engineering genius)

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a much larger one than this

 

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IDRA Gigapress custom ordered/designed for Tesla.

Giga Press - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Shots of molten aluminium weighing 80 kilograms (180 lb) are injected into the cold-chamber casting mold with a velocity of 10 metres per second (22 mph; 36 km/h).[7] The cycle time is ~80‒90 seconds,[2] allowing an output rate of 40‒45 completed castings per hour, or ~1,000 castings per day.

 

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Tesla's Giga Press Die Castings for Model 3 Eliminate 370 Parts | 3D-Prints

There is no question that Tesla CEO Elon Musk appreciates the hyperbole of terms like “giga.” Hence, Tesla’s Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada. So maybe it is no surprise that for the next generation of the company’s manufacturing, it has turned to Idra’s Giga Press for die casting large...

3d-prints.com

There is no question that Tesla CEO Elon Musk appreciates the hyperbole of terms like “giga.” Hence, Tesla’s Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada.
So maybe it is no surprise that for the next generation of the company’s manufacturing, it has turned to Idra’s Giga Press for die casting large portions of Tesla EVs. The name seems apt, as Idra’s die casting machines are the biggest in the work already, and it appears that Tesla has commissioned an even bigger one to make chassis components for its planned Cybertruck pickup.

Many carmakers use die casting today for portions of the chassis that benefit from localized stiffness, such as shock towers. But Tesla is resolved to using giant die castings to replace the entire front and rear sections of the chassis, replacing multiple stampings that must be fastened together.

It is part of a larger plan for Tesla to also move to structural battery cases that serve as the stressed center member of the platform, connecting the front and rear die castings. The combination of these changes decreases manufacturing cost and complexity as well as vehicle weight, according to Musk.

The die-cast/structural battery configuration is “an architecture we’ve been wanting to do at Tesla for a long time and we’ve finally figured it out,” Musk said at the company’s Battery Day presentation. “I think it is the way all electric cars in the future will ultimately be made. It is the right way to do things and tt starts with having a single-piece casting for the front body and the rear body.”

Those front and rear castings each replace modules made of 70 different parts of various materials that must be fastened and sealed appropriately. Tesla has started by employing the die cast rear structure, which will be followed by the front casting and then the battery pack. Combined, the changes eliminate an amazing 370 parts, Musk said.

Not only that, but this has also streamlined Model 3 production. “There’s roughly a thousand robots on the Model 3 body line,” Musk explained in a video interview on the Munro Live YouTube channel. “You want fewer things, not more. We got rid of 300 robots, just with that rear body casting. When we go to the front body casting, we’ll get rid of another 300 robots.”

The castings also eliminate opportunities for problems with the 70 joined pieces used previously. “I can’t emphasize enough the nightmare of sealing between the gaps” between the joined parts, Musk said. “That might be the most painful job in the whole factory, is spackling on the sealant.”

Tesla Motors

The Tesla Model 3’s chassis configuration with front and rear die castings and a central structural battery pack.
But until it took delivery of the Giga Press, Tesla had little choice, he continued. “You can muscle through it, and we have,” Musk remarked. “It is way better to have a single-piece casting. You don’t have gaps in the sealant. You don’t have dissimilar metals. You can reduce the size of the body shop dramatically.”

So why didn’t Tesla just built the Model 3 and its other EVs using such castings sooner? Because sufficiently huge die casting presses were not yet available.
Those front and rear castings each replace modules made of 70 different parts of various materials that must be fastened and sealed appropriately. Tesla has started by employing the die cast rear structure, which will be followed by the front casting and then the battery pack. Combined, the changes eliminate an amazing 370 parts, Musk said.

Not only that, but this has also streamlined Model 3 production. “There’s roughly a thousand robots on the Model 3 body line,” Musk explained in a video interview on the Munro Live YouTube channel. “You want fewer things, not more. We got rid of 300 robots, just with that rear body casting. When we go to the front body casting, we’ll get rid of another 300 robots.”

The castings also eliminate opportunities for problems with the 70 joined pieces used previously. “I can’t emphasize enough the nightmare of sealing between the gaps” between the joined parts, Musk said. “That might be the most painful job in the whole factory, is spackling on the sealant.”

Tesla Motors

The Tesla Model 3’s chassis configuration with front and rear die castings and a central structural battery pack.
But until it took delivery of the Giga Press, Tesla had little choice, he continued. “You can muscle through it, and we have,” Musk remarked. “It is way better to have a single-piece casting. You don’t have gaps in the sealant. You don’t have dissimilar metals. You can reduce the size of the body shop dramatically.”

So why didn’t Tesla just built the Model 3 and its other EVs using such castings sooner? Because sufficiently huge die casting presses were not yet available.


“The Giga Press itself presented many engineering challenges that our team resolved step by step during the research and development process, which took more than two years,” stated Idra general manager Riccardo Ferrario in a video posted on Idra’s YouTube channel announcing the company’s OL 6100 CS Giga Press.

“The most important innovated factor is the new injection system designed by our engineers,” he said. “The filling of the die requires that we move around 100 kilograms of aluminum into the die cavity in 60 to 100 milliseconds.”

Idra

The Idra Giga Press.
With that challenge solved, Ferrario says Idra is poised to help the entire auto industry shift from traditional stampings to castings. “Our ultimate goal with the Giga Press is to help transform the automotive industry into something simpler, efficient, and sustainable,” he said.

Currently, the Giga Press is available from the company’s catalog in versions that press with 5,500 tons of force and 6,200 tons. These are the machines that Tesla is using already.

However, Ferrario says that Idra has received an order from “a leading global manufacturer for new energy vehicles,” for an 8,000-ton version of the machine. This bigger machine will be needed to make the larger pieces of Tesla’s planned future models such as the Cybertruck pickup.

“This giant machine will be used for the production of chassis components of larger vehicles such as pickup trucks, full electric lightweight goods vehicles, and SUVs,” Ferrario said. “It is a milestone. It not only shows the capabilities of IDRA’s technical superiority, but also validates the many, many years of hard work that have gone into realizing this project.”

Idra

The inner workings of the Idra Giga Press.
The chassis castings are an enabling technology that will make possible Tesla’s goal of moving to structural battery packs, which are lighter and more space efficient than the current method of packaging batteries, Musk said.

“The cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes,” he said. “They actually have negative structural value. They don’t serve to aid in the structure of the car and they have to be isolated from the rest of the car, from vibration and shock loads, that kind of thing.”

That means that mass and space are occupied just to protect the cells. “Otherwise they’ll bang against the side of the battery casing, and that’s not good,” Musk said. “If you have a limited number of stringers for sheer transfer, [the battery pack structure] is still quite bendy. But as soon as you have a whole bunch of [battery cell] cans, or honeycomb or anything like that, and you bond an upper and lower face sheet, it gets crazy stiff. That’s really what you want.”

However, such structural battery pack enclosures are sensitive to point loading from attached front and rear chassis structures, which is where the die-cast chassis modules fit into the puzzle. “Those castings are quite important because you want to transfer load into the battery pack in a very smooth, continuous way so you don’t put point loads into the battery,” Musk explained. “You want to feather the load out, front and rear, into the structural battery.”

So, despite the hyperbole implied by liberal use of the prefix “giga,” Teslas built using die castings from the Giga Press and powered by batteries from the Gigafactory look certain to advance the EV state of the art.

 

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Tesla is building Model Y bodies with single front and rear castings, a manufacturing first

In an auto manufacturing first, Tesla has started building Model Y bodies with two giant single casting pieces for the...

electrek.co

Tesla is building Model Y bodies with single front and rear castings, a manufacturing first

In an auto manufacturing first, Tesla has started building Model Y bodies with two giant single casting pieces for the front and back of the electric SUV.

Tesla has been preparing to start production of the Model Y at two new factories, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas.

CEO Elon Musk has been hyping the new Model Y to be built at those factories as “a revolution in auto body engineering.”


He was referring to Tesla using mega-casting parts to have single body pieces for the rear and front of the electric SUV.


Over the last few years, the automaker has been heavily investing in casting and alloy technology to enable larger casted parts that have the capacity to greatly simplify manufacturing.

The company even acquired several units of the biggest casting machines in the world.

Tesla has already been producing the Model Y with a single rear body piece that replaced 70 different parts in the vehicle.

Earlier this year, a picture of the first single front casting part of the Model Y produced at Gigafactory Texas leaked.

It appears that a few months later, Tesla confirmed that it is now producing the Model Y body with the two parts.

In a picture released in its Q2 2021 financial results, the Model Y body production line shows new bodies going through the line:

It apparently went unnoticed, but a former Tesla employee with knowledge of the Model Y body was able to confirm from the picture that these bodies feature both single-piece front and rear casting parts and reached out to Electrek.

This is a first in auto manufacturing, and if successful, it could change the game.

A source familiar with Tesla’s body engineering listed some of the many benefits of such a design:

You save on new factory space, CAPEX (eliminate hundreds of welding robots & stamping machines), better NVH, lighter, increased range, make manufacturing simpler by reducing the number of stamping & welding, savings from eliminating tooling/maintenance cost of welding & stamping, vertical integration, better supply chain control, and so many other benefits.

Tesla has been wanting to go a step further and joined those two parts with a structural battery pack powered by its new 4680 battery cells unveiled last year.

However, the automaker has lately indicated that the integration of the new cells and structural battery pack might not be introduced with the start of Model Y production at the new factories.

Tesla has been guiding a start of production at Gigfafactory Texas and Berlin by the end of the year.

Electrek’s Take
This is an impressive achievement.

Tesla naysayers are quick to say that any other automaker can do it and they simply don’t because of the consequences when it comes to servicing.


It’s true that there are implications on body repairs when using such large casting parts and it remains to be seen what the cost of repairs would look like, but I’m not so sure that any other automaker can achieve this.


Casting large parts is hard and we believe that Tesla didn’t just order the biggest casting machines in the world to achieve this, but they also developed a custom alloy with the joint Tesla-SpaceX material team to make such large casted parts possible.


I think the Tesla-SpaceX material science team is not to be underestimated.


We expect Tesla to release more details about Model Y body production at Gigafactory Austin on Thursday when Tesla will hold its shareholders meeting at the new factory.

 

[F-22Raptor]

Tesla is building Model Y bodies with single front and rear castings, a manufacturing first

In an auto manufacturing first, Tesla has started building Model Y bodies with two giant single casting pieces for the...

electrek.co

Tesla is building Model Y bodies with single front and rear castings, a manufacturing first

In an auto manufacturing first, Tesla has started building Model Y bodies with two giant single casting pieces for the front and back of the electric SUV.

Tesla has been preparing to start production of the Model Y at two new factories, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas.

CEO Elon Musk has been hyping the new Model Y to be built at those factories as “a revolution in auto body engineering.”


He was referring to Tesla using mega-casting parts to have single body pieces for the rear and front of the electric SUV.


Over the last few years, the automaker has been heavily investing in casting and alloy technology to enable larger casted parts that have the capacity to greatly simplify manufacturing.

The company even acquired several units of the biggest casting machines in the world.

Tesla has already been producing the Model Y with a single rear body piece that replaced 70 different parts in the vehicle.

Earlier this year, a picture of the first single front casting part of the Model Y produced at Gigafactory Texas leaked.

It appears that a few months later, Tesla confirmed that it is now producing the Model Y body with the two parts.

In a picture released in its Q2 2021 financial results, the Model Y body production line shows new bodies going through the line:

It apparently went unnoticed, but a former Tesla employee with knowledge of the Model Y body was able to confirm from the picture that these bodies feature both single-piece front and rear casting parts and reached out to Electrek.

This is a first in auto manufacturing, and if successful, it could change the game.

A source familiar with Tesla’s body engineering listed some of the many benefits of such a design:



Tesla has been wanting to go a step further and joined those two parts with a structural battery pack powered by its new

4680 battery cells unveiled last year.

However, the automaker has lately indicated that the integration of the new cells and structural battery pack might not be introduced with the start of Model Y production at the new factories.

Tesla has been guiding a start of production at Gigfafactory Texas and Berlin by the end of the year.

Electrek’s Take
This is an impressive achievement.

Tesla naysayers are quick to say that any other automaker can do it and they simply don’t because of the consequences when it comes to servicing.


It’s true that there are implications on body repairs when using such large casting parts and it remains to be seen what the cost of repairs would look like, but I’m not so sure that any other automaker can achieve this.


Casting large parts is hard and we believe that Tesla didn’t just order the biggest casting machines in the world to achieve this, but they also developed a custom alloy with the joint Tesla-SpaceX material team to make such large casted parts possible.


I think the Tesla-SpaceX material science team is not to be underestimated.


We expect Tesla to release more details about Model Y body production at Gigafactory Austin on Thursday when Tesla will hold its shareholders meeting at the new factory.

Tesla is by far the most advanced vehicle manufacturer in the world.

 

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Tesla Model Y body for structural battery pack spotted at Gigafactory Texas

An interesting new Tesla Model Y body that appears to be designed for the new structural battery pack has been...

electrek.co

An interesting new Tesla Model Y body that appears to be designed for the new structural battery pack has been spotted at Gigafactory Texas ahead of the start of production.

Tesla has been aiming to start Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas in Austin by the end of the year, which is just a few days away.

The start of Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas is not only critical to the company’s growth, but it also marks the launch of a new version of the electric SUV featuring Tesla’s new structural battery pack and 4680 battery cells.

The idea is to produce large cylindrical cells and package them into a single module battery pack that also acts as the structural platform on which you install the vehicle’s body.

CEO Elon Musk has touted the technology as a “manufacturing revolution” in the auto industry.

For those two reasons, there are a lot of eyes on Tesla starting Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas.

We previously reported on Tesla ramping up its mega casting effort at the factory to produce Model Y bodies.

Now, in a new drone flyover of the plant, Joe Tegtmeyer spotted a new Model Y body on a truck:

Tesla previously disclosed that it will use the battery pack to install things that generally go onto the body’s floor, like the seat mounts.

Tesla plans to take a platform like this and marry it to the body that was recently spotted at Gigafactory Texas.

These pieces of the puzzle that is Model Y production are starting to appear, but it’s still not clear if Tesla can actually start production within the next few days to stick to its goal.

However, as we previously stated, the start of Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas is not as critical as how quickly Tesla can ramp up to volume production.

The company is expected to achieve volume production during the second half of 2022.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

They didn't make the "giga press" though. They bought it off the shelf from an Italian company and used it. It's like being proud of buying a necessity with money.

 

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https://twitter.com/x/status/1480952283689062404