Designing Aftermarket Stainless Steel Exhaust Systems

Ferrita is the Scandinavian market leader for designing and manufacturing stainless steel exhaust systems for cars, heavy vehicles, and construction machinery. They are on the leading edge of the automotive aftermarket industry with sound, powerful, and environmentally friendly alternatives.

Ferrita’s business focuses on long-term improvement through conscious effort to streamline processes and staff skills. Their corporate goal is to always aim to provide products at a competitive price with a focus on quality and environment. They needed a rational, cost-effective CAD solution to import customer data and effectively complement their existing design and production technology.

Ferrita Sweden has more than 50 years of experience producing high-quality stainless steel exhaust systems for cars, buses, recreational vehicles, ships, boats and industrial equipment.

Custom Stainless Steel Exhaust Systems

One example of Ferrita’s challenges is that they must design efficient stainless steel exhaust systems based on customer feedback. Much of this feedback is based on classic cars that are still rolling with the same exhaust setup as in the ’70s or ’80s.

Charles Ljung, a good Ferrita customer, got tired of changing his exhaust system every other year so he took his car to Ferrita. Using IronCAD’s Direct Edit abilities, they adapted his exhaust design to match the exact car requirements. The customer was so pleased that afterwards he claimed, “This is the best thing that I have ever done for my car and it will save me thousands over the years.”

Using IronCAD’s unique modeling paradigm, Ferrita is able to make product changes from customer feedback, updating models at any stage in the design process. Since they operate free from the burden of constraints and feature dependencies, they are able to automatically update all related documentation. The resulting IronCAD drawings make it easier to understand production issues, so that they consistently minimize the risk of errors.

IronCAD enables Ferrita to develop new exhaust products using the patented IronCAD TriBall. This efficient modeling tool offers an exciting range of possibilities for the end user. One can easily handle geometry positioning, rearranging, copying, linking, and much more. Ferrita has found that the ease-of-use benefits offered by the IronCAD TriBall are unique in the CAD world.

Lightweighting Stainless Steel Exhaust Systems

Another design challenge was to create a lightweight stainless steel exhaust system to reduce fuel consumption and ease environmental burdens. Weight is an issue when it comes to performance as stated by Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars: “Adding power makes you faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere! So, changing to a stainless steel exhaust system will improve the life span of the car, protect the environment, improve mileage and increase vehicle performance.”

Ferrita’s Enhanced Productivity

Since implementing the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite, Ferrita engineers have improved productivity, enhanced customer satisfaction and increased revenue in new markets. Using IronCAD’s virtual 3D scene, they can test and present a virtual product before production begins. Ferrita claims overall productivity gains of 12 percent. Plus, they found that they were able to develop products faster and more efficiently, sharing common data across a single integrated product suite.