Keeping you up to date with the latest CorkSport Mazdaspeed news!
In that last blog we forgot to mention the best part!
In addition to recognition, we’ll be providing a $100 non transferable gift certificate to be used toward the purchase of any of our CorkSport line of products for the individual whose design is chosen. Additionally, we will be providing awards to the 2nd and 3rd place designers as well and sending the winning designed T-shirt to the top 5 designers.
Get those creative juices flowing and let’s see what you’ve got!
We love to hear some of the ideas our customers have when it comes to product development. You have some great ideas that have been shared with us in the last few months.
In keeping with our goal of providing excellent customer service and technical support to our customers, we would love to hear some of the tips and tricks that you use when doing installations, modifications or routine maintenance of your Mazda. Could be great ways to keep the oil from spilling all over the rotor housings on your RX-7 during an oil change (that upside down filter is a gem, isn’t it!), solutions to removing or reinstalling the downpipe on the MS3 (those studs don’t like to stay put in the turbo, do they!), or even something as simple as methods on how to keep your tools organized or functioning to their fullest.
In return, we’ll give a 10% discount code (not to exceed $25) for use toward any CorkSport Brand Parts to the top three tips submitted in the next three months.
Feel free to submit video, photos or diagrams to support your ideas.* The clearer you make the content, the better your chances are of getting the discount. We’ll publish the best tips here in our blog and give credit to everyone who submitted ideas. Submit your content to: wr********@*******rt.com.
For Example:
Here’s an tip I learned from an Aircraft & Powerplant mechanic who spent countless hours slogging through the muck repairing Aircrane Helicopters that had broken down in the field (or more appropriately out in the middle of nowhere in the woods). This trick was so helpful that he kept a can of Bon Ami sink cleaner in his toolbox. Aircraft and automobile engineers love to use phillips drive screws to hold all sorts of things together. And whether we ourselves have ham-fisted an install and thrashed the phillips drive in the top of a screw or it was the fault of the DPO (Dip-$&*%Previous Owner) , the solution is often times to get out the dremel and make it worse before it gets any better.
Alas, there is a solution that works perfectly, especially in those applications where the Phillips drive is HUGE and holds something on with substantial amounts of torque and your ‘bash it with a hammer’ impact screwdriver has eaten the top of the screw for breakfast.
So before you put all your weight into your battery powered screwdriver and turn what still looks remotely like a usable screw into a finely machined cone…take a deep breath. Go into the kitchen or (if you’re a bachelor and don’t know what this room in your house is for other than storing giant garbage bags of empty natty light cans) grocery store and pick up a can of abrasive sink cleaner like Bon Ami or another abrasive polishing powder. Mix it up into a paste and dip the end of your screwdriver into it. The paste is aggressive and will grab uneven surfaces of the drive in the screw and it will come right out. Make sure to continue to use plenty of downward pressure as well so the driver doesn’t just jump out of the contour of the screw. This trick also works well on partially rounded off hex drive fasteners like those M8 head exhaust manifold heat shield bolts on the MS3/MS6/CX-7.
Just don’t let your wife know that you’ve been stealing things out of the kitchen for use in the shop.
They don’t like that.
– Jason
*All content submitted will become the property of CorkSport.
We’re running low on T-Shirts, and while this isn’t a random plea to ask for yours, we most certainly do need your help. While years ago, design was relegated to a select group of people who had mastered the skills of layout, design and illustration, today some of the most talented designers don’t even do that for a living. So we’re calling on our customers and other enthusiasts to help us come up with a design for the new CorkSport swag.
The only requirements are that the design be a two spot color layout in EPS vector format (or easily converted to vector format), and that it be creative. The only thing we’ve got as a starting point is the CorkSport Mazda Performance logo, available from us in vector format via email.
The design will cover the back of the shirts and may also be used on other media. Credit will gladly be given via our blog, the description of the product on our website and we’ll allow you to either use your forum screen name, actual name or initials to autograph the design which will be printed on any of the products that carry this design.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us or post comments on this blog or any of the forums where this is posted. We love working with our customers to help design the best products for your vehicles and we thought it would be fitting (pun intended) to bring our customers into the design process for our apparel as well.
Remember that we carry a full line of Mazda Parts for vehicles from the Familia 323 all the way up to the 2010 Mazda3 with all flavors of Piston, Rotary, FWD, RWD & AWD variants in between!
On Friday the 29th I drove up to the Taco7 meeting in Federal Way, Washington to hang out with fellow rotary nuts for the evening. There was a good range of rotary power represented at the meeting despite the cold weather and rain. Unfortunately I was not able to bring any rotary power myself so I drove the CorkSport 2010 Mazdaspeed 3 instead, which worked out better for a customer who was getting his CorkSport header, racepipe, and cat back exhaust delivered. One of the cool things I saw at the event was a set of 1st gen RX-7 Re-Amemiya mirrors wit the built in air guide. It was the first time I had ever seen a set, and I’ve seen a lot of rare parts! There were several good looking RX-8s at the meet as well, including the one below which had the AutoExe brace sets installed. I love the way those braces look.
It was great getting to hang out with a bunch of rotary fans, if you own a rotary powered vehicle, you should come to the next Taco7 meet!
– Derrick
One of the most difficult development hurdles for any manufacturer of aftermarket parts is using the right design tools for the job. I’m prefer working in 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Machining (CAM) systems and for me, it’s much easier to design up a product in the computer and be ready to go to production shortly thereafter than it is to fabricate something and then effectively reverse engineer the design into drawings and fixtures for the machine shop, tubing house and other fabrication vendors. But that requires that we start with some knowledge of where things are at on the vehicle in three dimensional space so we have a layout to work from.
Getting a good starting point to work from requires either a manufacturers computer model or skilled reverse engineering to generate that layout. There are a few ways to accomplish this -have ins with the factory and engineers at Mazda (which we have had for some time and are always dedicated to further developing), have the right tools to accurately and repeatably pull the information from the car into the CAD environment or by fabricating a working design and trying to refine that once it is complete. The difficulty of the latter method is that once you have a fabricated working design at hand, I find it a bit more difficult to think outside of the box or consider scrapping your hard work for a better design. Quick development turnaround time and being able to save multiple configurations of a design without cannibalizing the original by using CAD software makes thinking outside of the box a reality.
So what do we start with and where do we go when developing a product line?
Factory CAD Model Data
Having good connections and access to factory vehicle model content is, depending on manufacturer either extremely difficult or well facilitated through on board tech transfer programs. We’ll be gathering existing model data and comparing it to the vehicles we have in house for verification. In addition to this we’re hoping to broaden our relationship with Mazda to start gathering other CAD data where required to develop new and innovative products.
3D Digitizing Equipment
We recently had the opportunity to utilize some cutting edge technology for laying out future development on our 2010 MazdaSpeed3. Calling on Chris Jundt & Leta Holt at Hexagon Metrology, we worked with a Romer Infinite 2.0 Portable 4-Axis Coordinate Measuring Machine to digitize a number of areas on the Speed3 so that we can get a substantial boost in the return on our time invested in developing chassis bracing, molded fiberglass and rubber/urethane functional styling components and induction systems accessories. Consisting of a carbon fiber armature linked together by four extremely high resolution and accuracy Heidenhain Rotary Encoders and ending with a spherical ruby stylus, the Infinite 2.0 can map any elements that exist in an up to 4-12′ sphere (depending on model) to an extremely high accuracy and repeatability. This was just what our development for the 2010 MS3 needed. Our time mapping out the unibody and chassis components went quickly. We gathered data points on all of the rear hatch mount points and chassis bracing configurations that we had already mocked up into functional prototypes. When items were out of reach, we used the arm to generate a repeatable coordinate system which allowed us to move the arm and later stitch the two files back together seamlessly.
Using these technologies gives us the opportunity to develop a variety of improved designs as well expand our product market. And not only that, but it’s a lot of fun to be able to design parts as fluidly as you can sketch and erase on a chalkboard without consuming any raw materials until you’re satisfied with the results.
We’ll discuss more about how these technologies are assisting us in our upcoming blogs on chassis bracing solutions and R&D.
– Jason