“It’s now the most difficult part we make,” says company founder Edvaldo Antonio da Rosa. “It took many months of testing to develop the procedures.” The heavily milled 7075 aluminum block manifold has deep, intersecting blind holes, some as small as 2 mm diameter. Numerous other bores, recesses and curved surfaces often require 6-micron tolerances, and it requires 160 individual CMM checks to generate the final 61-page inspection report that accompanies each unit.

ToyoMatic solved many of the problems that baffled others by optimising its tooling to reduce the major causes of inaccuracy: vibration, thermal growth and chip-induced tool runout. “We’ve distilled the manufacturing process down to only six operations but we still use 112 different tools,” says Mr da Rosa.

The HTA consortium brings together companies with over 15 years of experience in the aerospace sector offering a range of products and services. The majority of the consortium’s companies were founded by ex-Embraer employees – one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world and the largest Brazilian client of the HTA companies.