70 Dossier | Suter Industries engineers with stringent and changeable requirements, flexibility is key to Suter’s production process. Hence, it has very deliberately optimised everything around CNC machining and very little around casting. In Suter’s view, casting would also mean further disadvantages, compared with CNC machining, such as having to make the parts thicker and less lightweight than they are at present, as well as having to X-ray or otherwise inspect cast components deeply to confirm the absence of porosities, and of the sorts of flaws or weaknesses that can occur as a casting mould ages and wears. “But if you buy billet for machine cutting, you know it’s going to arrive as perfectly solid metal with no voids or micro cracks that could make it into the final engine,” says Lars Jaeger, CCO at Suter. “If a customer were to ask for 10,000 or maybe 5000 units, and sign a contract saying they’ll never ever request a design change, then maybe we’d consider casting. But we’d have to re-evaluate the whole production process from start to finish. If you look, for instance, at the walls of our crankcase [including the cylinders, which are integral to the crankcase], you’ll notice they’re just a few millimetres thick in most places, saving a lot of weight. “That’s really hard to pull off unless you’ve amassed a lot of in-house expertise and training on how to use CNC machines really well. We wouldn’t have survived in motorsport if we hadn’t; the race is always on Sunday. If a part needs to be replaced or redesigned, it has to be done so perfectly, and there’s no time to lose.” Within the production area, numerous five-axis CNC machines can be found; these being indispensable to the geometries required of the crankcase and cylinder head. Some three-axis CNC machines are also present (and used for relatively less complex parts, such as crankshaft pieces and connecting rods), as are automatic dual-spindle lathes and a TIG welding robot. The CNC machines are run for most of every business day, with shifts from early morning late into the night, as part of a strategy built around flexibility. Custom requests or new flight-testing data received one morning can result in newly iterated parts being cut before the next. “We also have our own engraving machine, which is important as every single part used in each aviation engine has to be engraved with a serial number. That’s critical for 100% quality control [QC], and hence traceability and certifiability of what we supply to UAV makers,” Jaeger adds. “In the interest of QC and reaction time, we decided two years ago to invest in a 3D coordinate-measuring machine February/March 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Several five-axis CNC machines, three-axis CNC machines, automatic dual-spindle lathes, a TIG welding robot and an engraving machine can be found within Suter’s manufacturing facility The company acquired a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) two years ago, for better QC and timing over the validation of component geometries and tolerances (Image courtesy of the author)
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