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Like so many other manufacturing sectors in our society, the automotive and motorsports world have been upended over the last couple of years by supply chain issues and increases in material costs that have presented never-before-seen challenges to doing business.
As steel prices have skyrocketed, so too has the price of scrap iron. The racing torque converter market has been hit hard by this, as manufacturers are finding it ever more difficult to find cores to buy and build their converters from. Neal Chance Racing Converters (NCRC), long at the forefront of all things torque converters, believed it could help shore up this problem. The company, led by Marty Chance, has invested over the last number of months in building all of the tooling needed to stamp parts for converters.
As Chance tells us, most manufacturers use an aftermarket sprag, billet drive cover, and fabricated or billet stator. So what they largely are in need of are donor turbine impellers and pump impellers. NCRC is ramping up to stamp 8-, 9-, and 10-inch pumps and turbines. It will manufacture these with thicker, heavier-duty fins for racing duty, and furnace-brazing them (a metal-joining technique that creates tighter tolerances and cleaner parts). They are also brand new parts, which is also of benefit.
“The first production run of 10-inch has already been done,” Marty says. “We stamped them much like our billets. It’s not a copy of an OE, but a racing-specific converter core; thicker fins, fully furnace-brazed, and in different blade angles (10-, 20-, 30-degrees, for example). So now we have a brand new racing-specific core that’s heavier duty and has more options — we’re not just stuck with one pump fin angle. We have the 10-inch pumps done, and we have the first version of the 10-inch turbine prototype, but we had to do a couple of revisions on that, and will hopefully have tooling modified and all ironed out for the first production run within a couple months. The next ones to be finished will be the 8-inch pump and turbine; we’re hoping to have the first production run done in 90 days. And we hope to have a lot of this done by PRI [Performance Racing Industry show in December].”
“These are not some re-purposed units from somebody’s Buick that sat in a salvage for 30 years — these are actually made for racing, with fully furnace-brazed thicker veins, oversized bearing surfaces, balloon plates, and oversized GM hub (final cut OD to size),” Chance adds. “We’re doing this in such large quantity to get the price down; this allows us to supply everybody, so the industry doesn’t need to panic. We’re addressing it. We want to let everyone know that they aren’t going to run out of converter cores, we are stamping them.”
…the industry doesn’t have to sweat it, we’ve got their back. They’ll be able to buy a higher quality, racing-specific core for probably less than what they’re paying for something that’s been laying in a junkyard for decades. – Marty Chance
“On the 10-inch, there’s three main converters that everyone uses: the 10-inch Ford, the 265mm GM, and the 265mm Nissan. This pump we are stamping works with any of those three. So regardless of which one a converter company prefers to build from, this works with all three of them. We just changed the diameter of the turbine ring where the stator sits to the diameter of the turbine you want to run with it,” Marty explains.
The specific tooling is both proprietary and top-secret, but Chance explains that the components effectively begin as sheet metal that goes into an “enormous press” and stamps the material into the torque converter shell. Then, the blades and turbine ring are stamped individually. All of it is then placed inside a converter in a tooling press, which bends the tab down that holds them all together.
“We’ve been thinking for years about doing this. When we started hearing about suppliers scrapping the cores, and now they’re so difficult to get, we decided that’s it, we’re pulling the trigger and making this happen. And we’re doing it as fast as possible, but it’s a tremendous amount of work to make the tooling for this stuff,” he says.
Companies will have the option to buy them as a core and final-machine them themselves to their specification, or in finished form.
“We have people call us and say they’ve never used anything but so-and so’s converter, but they’ve had a converter on order for four months and still haven’t gotten it,” Marty shares. “They ask how fast we can get it, and I tell them, ‘we can build it and have it done tomorrow.’ We’ve been investing millions of dollars in producing in-stock inventory. Raw material is the only thing we can run out of, because we make everything in-house. We’ve been buying raw material four, five, six, seven years at a time. We’ve got a pretty large facility, and we’re running out of room.”
Marty says in closing, “We’ve been innovating so much of the technology in the racing torque converter world over the last 40 years, from the bolt-together converter, the first billet drive covers, billet stators, the first all-billet converters, the 10-strut mechanical diode. We’ve been there from the beginning, and we’re committed to being here for the long haul. So the industry doesn’t have to sweat it, we’ve got their back. They’ll be able to buy a higher quality, racing-specific core for probably less than what they’re paying for something that’s been laying in a junkyard for decades.”
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