The engine principle is relatively simple. Anyone with a certain level of knowledge can understand the structure and principles of a car engine. But why is it still unable to produce first-class engines in China? To outsiders, it seems that producing an engine is not a big problem. It should be possible to produce a high-quality engine. Why can't our country produce engines that can compete with developed countries?
1. When you first saw the title, did you also have this thought when you were young?
In the 1950s and 1960s, the old Hongqi was reverse engineered from Rolls-Royce.
It won’t be possible in the future, and the materials and technology won’t be able to keep up.
It became even more difficult after the 1980s. It was too difficult to reverse engineer electronic equipment. In the early 1980s, the Intel 8080 was copied in China. Now try to imitate the i7? No play at all.
Among other industrial products, the closest thing is the camera. In the 1960s, there were domestic imitations of the Leica M3 and Hasselblad 500, namely the domestically produced Hongqi and Dongfeng cameras. The former produced more than 200 units, while the latter produced less than 100. tower. The current collection price of these two machines is in the hundreds of thousands, which is far more than their prototypes. It is also a wonder.
Now, how about trying to imitate a SLR? It's completely impossible.
Everything from the cylinder block to the cylinder head to the piston, crankshaft and camshaft is made by CNC from aluminum ingots to steel ingots. I have a thorough understanding of certain engines and will customize and modify them according to different applications and loads, rather than simply making them exactly the same as the original ones. Use motec or other complete sets of circuits.
There are many such brands in North America and the UK. They are blurprinting engines. Serious players will know these brands.
But there are no such players in China. They always like to spend millions to buy ready-made products and think they are awesome.
It would be great to buy TMD Maggi and go back to the village to play.
Cylinder head superflow airflow test
In fact, for automobile manufacturers, they purchase competitors' products, conduct testing, measurement and even disassembly analysis. This kind of thing is very normal. Almost every manufacturer has an organization similar to benchmarking modules and dismantling modules.
When establishing a project, product managers will definitely compare horizontally with competitors and vertically with historical products to specify the positioning of their own products. The data for horizontal comparison is obtained by measuring and testing rival vehicles.
But measurement, testing or even disassembly is not about copying the other party’s products, but about finding gaps, ideas, and configurations.
New machine horsepower test
Why can’t it be copied? In addition to what I wrote below, it is basically impossible to obtain the opponent’s drawing data. There are also some suppliers that are exclusive to others. Some technologies are proprietary to others. You can even find that many automobile OEMs are constantly investing in parts factories and cross-holding.
But dismantling and benchmarking are very useful. In many cases, we can learn the layout methods of advanced manufacturers. Many questions may be just an idea or a train of thought. An expert will know at a glance the problem that originally troubled him, and can see how the other party solved it. Otherwise, the same problem would exist.
In the face of two competitors with little difference in technical capabilities, there is no generational difference in many technologies. Many times, it is a matter of ideas, what you want and whether you can do it. An idea may capture the market. Latecomers can only share some scraps.
Ultra-low temperature treatment Cryogenic treatment
Many people have mentioned Zotye’s imitation. What I want to say is that if it is within the scope of the law, it does not infringe the other party’s patents, etc. Copying the appearance and design elements of a best-selling product is definitely a safe and guaranteed method. As for whether there are moral issues, I don't want to comment.
For latecomers, copying and learning are ways to make rapid progress, but everyone understands that if you keep copying, your competitors will always be one step ahead of you. Even at some stages, people can rely on their technical threshold to Get rid of you quickly.
In the IT industry, this kind of thing is actually more obvious. You see Intel constantly updating chip technology and changing CPU interface architecture. Apple is constantly improving its product system. Xiaomi and Huawei continue to develop flagships and use so-called black technology to crush and throw away their opponents.
Many people may have never been to a factory or understood the factory production system. Then you may not understand many of the things I said.
To put it simply, no matter how precise the measurement is, you still cannot get the true dimensions and corresponding tolerance requirements of the parts.
There are many things that cannot be seen, such as heat treatment methods, assembly requirements, material requirements, etc.
There are even some things that cannot be made even with drawings. For example, when our country did not have multi-degree-of-freedom machining centers in the past, it was very difficult to process the curved surface of propellers. Americans don't sell us equipment either.
What's more, if you make some things according to other people's requirements, and assemble them yourself, they will be different from others.
(To give my own example, in 2005, I was responsible for an engine fuel injection pump matching project, which was targeted at a large factory in Nanchang. The competitors were Bosch and Denso. We each sent 5 I remember that the project requirement was 60 kilowatts. The five pumps we sent were 63, 52, and 59. They were all between 58 and 59. This incident made me extremely discouraged at the time. I was frustrated because Bosch's parts were OEMed by us, but I just went back to assemble them myself. Later I learned that Bosch's assembly line has a fully automatic shim-sizing device that adjusts the shims according to the span of 0.01 mm. At that time, the tolerance accuracy of gaskets was only controlled to ±0.01, and the classification during assembly was divided into ±0.04)
Is this simple? It's very simple, who wouldn't think of making it more elaborate? Is it difficult? It’s difficult. We want to be the same as Bosch at that time. At the very least, we need to add a CNC precision grinder, and the assembly production cycle must also be slowed down, because our assembly line manually screens the adjustment shims.
(Someone asked about the outcome of this matter. The outcome is that we won the bid. Because our quotation was half of the opponent’s. So how to solve the accuracy problem? We sent additional debugging workers, and each pump It’s as simple as debugging after offline. Foreigners don’t do this because their labor is expensive and Chinese people are cheap and it takes more time.)
So, let me ask you, I was holding it. With the exact same parts as Bosch, why can’t we make products of the same quality as them?
Let me ask you, if I don’t have these parts and I measure their products, can I make the same products as theirs?
For any complex industrial system product, it is not only an item produced, but behind it is a complete production system and management and control system.
The manufacturing of aircraft carriers is like this,
The manufacturing of automobiles is like this, and the manufacturing of engines is like this.
Don’t underestimate the technical content of these mechanical products around you.
Want to imitate an engine? Dimensional tolerances are always a flaw. This cannot be made up by rich experience or a thorough understanding of technology. The design does not follow the specifications invariably, but can only be locked after multiple trade-offs and repeated verifications. It is theoretically impossible to completely reproduce 100% of the tolerance in reverse.
What about surface treatment? As for the method and time of each heat treatment process, assuming we have sufficiently powerful heat treatment technology, we can roughly analyze the depth of the treatment layer, metallographic analysis, and empirical judgment through extremely high-cost methods.
We add another variable, calibration.
You need to adjust the combustion, timing, and limit value monitoring of the engine according to the status of the original vehicle, based on the principle that the calibration data cannot be completely copied. Suppose that out of a thousand variables, you can make nine hundred variables consistent through bench testing and empirical inference (master level), then an error of 10 will be added here, and different parameter controls will bring different problems. .
Then there is reliability. If it is calibrated with good materials or other methods, the engine will be different! If nothing else, your reliability cannot be guaranteed. No matter how high-strength the material is, it cannot guarantee a long service life under the wrong movement clearance and improper combustion.
Then we add another variable, thermal management. Add another variable, noise and vibration.
The working principle of the engine is very simple. It is extremely simple to build an identical engine. The difficulty lies in the basic science and the material of the engine itself. Yes, you can think of it as steelmaking. China is relatively backward in the field of smelting. Therefore, many industries have been restricted from developing. For example, the smelting technology in the United States is very good, but the steel plates for nuclear submarines still require Swedish technology. Don't underestimate Sweden, it is the originator of the smelting industry.
Currently, 70% to 80% of the world’s special steel is made in Sweden and processed in Germany. U.S. and Japanese applications. Although China ranks first in steel production in the world, it is all crude steel. When our basic smelting technology improves, many of the current technical problems will be easily solved. But I think it’s a waste of time. Many non-ferrous metal companies make money in real estate. Their jobs are stagnant, and ship and aircraft technology is still there. Rely on Soviet technology.