Form follows function to create impressively manufactured materials.
What starts off as humble pieces of billet steel bar-stock ends up turning into rigid, lightweight, and extremely durable rocker arm assemblies. Darrell Reid took the time to explain some of the details to us regarding the process, although he didn’t share every detail, citing the all-too-familiar competitive secrets clause—and who can blame him?
As each one of these rocker asemblies is truly developed for its particular application, careful attention is paid to the minute details during the manufacturing process, from initial contact all the way through delivery of the finished product.
One way the company works with its customers to ensure they receive the correct products is to ship each one a mockup assembly prior to delivering the finished product, to ensure valvetrain geometry is correct.
“We send those out and provide our customer with a means of checking the assembly prior to purchasing. That way they know their geometry is correct and we don’t have to send assemblies back and forth. We don’t want them to buy it until they know it’s going to work,” says Reid. “We have found that there are three or four heads that are the same—the Brad, the MBE, the Noonan Super 600 Blackhawk head—those particular heads are close enough to each other that we don’t get out of what we would call an acceptable range.”
However, he says the Muscle Head IV from Alan Johnson—which is, of course,
the head used on our Hemi—requires a different configuration due to subtle differences in the design.
“We digitized the valve locations and we saw enough of a difference that we wanted to make a different stand; a unique assembly to that specific head,” he explains.
Reid rocker assemblies are an I-beam design, constructed from solid billet 4340 steel and are heat-treated for longevity. Each rocker offers pushrod oiling through the adjusting screw to ensure pushrod tips stay cool and lubricated. Reid’s secret to success is offering components which are optimized to provide the perfect location for the roller over the valve tip.
Every Reid rocker arm starts as a sawed-off chunk of billet steel bar stock, chosen for its material properties and strength, and then the company’s CNC machines go to work to end up with the finished product. Every piece of these rocker arm systems save for the springs, bronze bushings and the nuts and bolts are made in-house at Reid Machine. Most of the machining operations are performed on one rocker arm at a time, with the exception of some of the finishing work, where they can do four rockers at once. The level of precision machine work that goes into these is simply staggering, and Reid credits the company’s development of their proprietary tooling as the key to this consistency.
In years past, all of these design tasks would have been incredibly labor-intensive, with many, many hours invested in measuring, checking, testing, and measuring again, before a piece of material was ever touched. But these days, thanks to the advances made with respect to digital measuring, 3D modeling, and other computerized manufacturing techniques, the work is done in a different way. In fact, often the customer will be able to send a digital drawing of the cylinder head configuration so that Reid is able to work his magic right on the screen before ever turning on a machining center. Since many of the Hemi cylinder heads the company works with are manufactured from billet, the digital representation of the cylinder head already exists.
The ability exists for one company or customer to send a digital representation of a product, so another company is able to manufacture a mating part to complement it. “You have an exact representation from the machining model. This is what they are making the part from; they sent me the head, the valve tip locations, the pushrod tubes in the head, and the lifter location, and I was able to build my valvetrain from that,” says Reid. The advantage to this is that the cylinder head manufacturer need not send sensitive data like port locations and cross-sections—they can strip this data from the model before sending it to Reid.
What I’m looking for is the most efficient path of converting radial motion into linear motion.— Darrell Reid, Reid Machine
But none of this happens without an initial concept of what the designer—Darrell Reid himself, in this case—envisions with respect to how the product needs to function and look once the design process is complete. To that end, Darrell shares that he doesn’t sleep much.
“What I’m looking for is the most efficient path of converting radial motion into linear motion; when you look at the valvetrain, the lifter is creating linear motion from the radial rotation of the cam. So then you have the linear motion of the pushrod to the rocker. That linear motion puts into play radial motion of the adjuster, which turns into radial motion of the roller at the top of the valve, then converting it back to linear motion of the valve going up and down. At the same time you’re using the arc of the adjuster and the arc of the roller in the most efficient manner so that we don’t have lost motion,” says Reid.
That lengthy explanation helps to explain Reid’s simple goal: maximizing the efficiency of the radial motion to create linear motion on the valve.