Sheet Metal Pressing Tooling
DEP Pipes are a performance exhaust manufacturer based in Kent, producing competition and aftermarket exhaust systems for motorcycles across motocross, enduro, and road racing applications. The tooling design work covers the complete pressing tool assemblies required to manufacture sheet metal exhaust components to the correct geometry - from bottom plates and punch forms through to top plate assemblies and punch spacers.
Each tooling layout defines a complete tool set: every component, its material, its mass, its finish specification, and how the assembly fits together. The drawings are produced to formal release standard with full part numbering, revision control, and bill of materials - ready to go directly to the tool maker and subsequently to the press shop floor.
The work has been ongoing since 2015, covering multiple product lines as DEP's range has developed. Left-hand and right-hand tool sets are produced as separate but coordinated drawing packages wherever the component geometry demands it.
Product Lines
Three distinct product tooling packages have been developed, each covering a specific exhaust component pressed to fit a particular model range.
Kawasaki KX500
Front pipe tooling for the KX500. Full tool set including punch spacer, bottom plate, top plate assembly with outer and filler sections, and punch slug. First complete tooling package in the series.
Silencer Front Cone
Left and right hand tool sets for the PH20021 silencer front cone. Punch LH/RH, bottom plate, top plate assembly. Paired layout drawings coordinated across both hands.
Front Pipe PMR250
Complete front pipe tooling for the PMR250 product line. Includes filler top plate, outer top plates (qty 2), punch spacer and form. Most recent release in the tooling series.
Tooling Layouts
Each layout shows the assembled tool in isometric view alongside plan views of both hands, detail sections at key features, and the full bill of materials. The exploded assembly view separates each component to show the build sequence and how the punch form locates within the plate stack.
Images show rendered CAD views from the tooling layout drawings. Full drawing packages are not published.
S7R Silencer Flow Study
The DEP S7R is a competition silencer used across multiple motorcycle platforms. The carbon fibre end cap, stainless steel body, and perforated internal core make it a well-regarded product - but internal flow behaviour was uncharacterised. This analysis began as independent work using SolidWorks Flow Simulation, and the findings were subsequently shared with DEP.
The study models exhaust gas flow through the silencer from inlet to outlet, generating velocity flow trajectories through the internal volume. The perforated core is modelled as a porous region with defined resistance characteristics. Flow trajectories are seeded at the inlet and tracked through the domain, colour-mapped to velocity in m/s.
The primary purpose of this study was to establish a baseline flow field for the production geometry - a necessary starting point before any development iteration can be meaningfully evaluated.
Flow Visualisation
The output below shows two trajectory sets: one seeded through the central core region, the second through the annular volume between the perforated core and the outer can. The colour mapping reveals the velocity distribution across both regions and makes recirculation zones immediately visible.
Velocity Scale Reference
Trajectory colour is interpolated continuously across the scale. The two trajectory sets (core and annular) are run simultaneously, showing how flow from the inlet distributes between the perforated core path and the outer volume.
Internal Assembly
The section view below shows the full internal arrangement of the S7R without the outer can, making the perforated core geometry, mounting bracket, and outlet cone visible. This view was used to verify that the CFD domain correctly represented the physical assembly before any results were interpreted.
Background & Method
How the tooling drawing packages are structured, and how the CFD analysis was set up and interpreted.
A tooling layout drawing defines the complete assembly of components required to press a specific part to the correct geometry. It specifies the bottom plate, punch form, top plate assembly (comprising outer and filler sections), punch spacer, and the fastener schedule - quantities, thread specification, and grade.
Every component in the assembly appears in the bill of materials with its DEP part number, description, and quantity. Where a component is new to the drawing package, it appears on the subsequent sheets with its own detail dimensions, material specification, and mass. This means a single drawing package gives the tool maker everything needed to build the tool, and the press operator everything needed to identify, assemble, and use it correctly.
Performance exhaust components are frequently mirror-image pairs - the left-hand front pipe follows a different swept path to the right-hand. The punch form must replicate that geometry exactly, which means a left-hand punch and a right-hand punch are different parts.
Producing them as separate but coordinated layout drawings - both referencing the same bottom plate and top plate assembly where those are common, but calling up handed punches and any handed locating features separately - eliminates any ambiguity at the tool maker and at the press. The drawings are typically released together as a L/R package under a single document number, with the hand called out in the part number suffix and in the title block.
SolidWorks Flow Simulation is a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) tool that runs within the SolidWorks CAD environment. It solves the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow through a defined geometry, using a Cartesian cut-cell mesh that is generated automatically from the CAD model. This makes it particularly practical for analysis work where the CAD geometry already exists - there is no need to re-model the domain in a separate meshing tool.
For the S7R study, the silencer CAD model was used directly. The internal volume was defined as the fluid domain, the perforated core was represented as a porous medium with defined pressure-drop characteristics, and flow trajectories were seeded at the inlet face. The solver was run to convergence and the resulting velocity field was post-processed to generate the colour-mapped trajectory images.
The colour scale maps flow velocity in metres per second, ranging from 0 m/s at the blue end (stagnant or reversing flow) to ~19.7 m/s at the red end (peak velocity, typically at the inlet jet or at constrictions within the flow path). The scale is linear between these bounds.
Reading the trajectory lines alongside the colour tells you two things at once: how fast the gas is moving at any point along its path, and the path itself. A trajectory that loops back on itself in blue indicates a recirculation zone - a region where gas is trapped and circulating rather than progressing toward the outlet. These zones represent energy that has been extracted from the main flow and not recovered - they are a direct indicator of back-pressure generation within the silencer volume.
A silencer has two competing requirements: it must attenuate sound pressure, and it must not generate significant back-pressure. These objectives pull in opposite directions. The features that create acoustic losses - abrupt expansions, baffles, porous sections - are the same features that generate fluid dynamic losses.
Flow simulation allows those trade-offs to be quantified. It shows whether the gas is expanding smoothly into the can volume and distributing through the perforated core, or whether it is jetting through the inlet, bypassing the core, and arriving at the outlet cone with significant kinetic energy still concentrated in a narrow stream. It shows whether the outlet cone angle is recovering pressure efficiently or separating. Each of these observations points to a specific design parameter that can be adjusted - core diameter, perforation area, baffle position, or cone half-angle - and the effect of that adjustment can be evaluated in the next simulation cycle before any metal is cut.
Baseline analysis of an existing product answers a question that is almost never formally addressed during initial development: what does the internal flow actually do? Not what it was designed to do, not what the acoustic testing suggests - what the flow field shows when the geometry is modelled and solved.
For a product that sells well and performs well, that baseline is still valuable. It gives you a datum. If a future revision changes the core diameter, or a different application requires a longer can body, you can run the revised geometry against the baseline and measure the change. Without the baseline, each iteration is being evaluated in isolation. With it, every change is a controlled experiment with a known reference point.
In this case, the baseline also served a second purpose: it demonstrated the application of the methodology to DEP, opening the discussion about where simulation-led development could be applied across their product range.