If you have been following our Facebook page, Instagram, or Email Subscription, you might have heard that R Theory Motorsports took on a project to help contribute to Speed Academy's BADASS2000 build. Long story short, I talked to Dave from Speed Academy and I designed a cool looking battery tie down for his S2000, He loved the design, so it was up to me to bring that design into a reality. I took lots of pictures along the way to give you a behind the scenes look at how parts are machined; specifically this BADASS battery tie down!

First I started out with a raw block of aluminum, a little bit bigger than the bracket in all 3 dimensions. I didn't take any pictures of the raw aluminum, but it pretty much looks like this.

The block of aluminum is put in a vise that I set up in the CNC  3 Axis mill, then it's quickly roughed into shape. It isn't cut to the exact sizes yet.

After being roughed out, the sloped ends of the bracket were milled.

If you look closely at the last two images, you can see a raised section of aluminum in the middle of the bracket. This is where the BADASS2000 characters will start to appear with some more machining. A very small tool starts to slowly cut away material to reveal the coolest feature of the part.

After all that magic happens, the two holes on each end are drilled and the part is taken out of the machine and flipped over to mill the backside.

When milling a part, ideally you program the machine to remove all sharp edges and burrs to create a nice looking part and minimizing time deburring a part by hand. But sometimes unusual geometry doesn't allow you to use your CNC tools to deburr the part. So on this part, most of the edges were deburred with files and sand paper. Then put into the sandblaster to give it a nice uniform look.

This is what they look like after sand blasting. After this step, they're off for black powdercoat at Stripping Technologies Inc.

After powder coat the entire part is covered in a beautiful semi gloss black powder coat, including the top of the letters. This is not what we want, so I'll show you what I did to fix that. I put the brackets back into the mill, and used a tool with very sharp cutting edges to skim the top of the letters. This exposed a very beautiful aluminum face making each character glimmer in the light.

And that folks is a behind the scenes look at how these parts were made. If you thought it was interesting, I would love to get more media in the future like video on how parts are made.