Thread: The Durrani Interviews - Part 3 of 5

Part 3.

Wheels Off the Track.

The success of the thixocore was incorrectly seen as an indicator of success for the whole process.

At the time that Durrani designed the mold and shot his first successful wheel core in March of 2007, it was the largest thixomolded piece intended for production in the world. The mass of magnesium forming the thixocore was nearly at the limit of the capacity of the largest machine in existence.

Because of the inherent difficulties involved with manufacturing large parts in this way, few thought it could be done successfully. Bill Stewart, a manufacturer’s representative for Husky, the company who built the thixomolding machine, provided some perspective. “There were questions and doubts about a piece this size, but when we all sat down with our applications engineers, they thought with Sheryar’s expertise in magnesium that the design was there. It needed a few tweaks, but it was there.” Durrani’s longtime associations in the magnesium world created a fruitful basis for partnering in the development of this technology. In fact, the companies heavily invested in this technology were eagerly waiting for a pioneering champion to mainstream this process for large production parts.

The design of the mold had to take into account the demands of the product (strength and shock absorption), and the intricacies of the thixomolding process. This requires the flow of the metal to take place in a manner that precludes the convergence of two cooling flows of metal within the wheel. The transition states or directional solidification that would result creates unacceptable weaknesses in the metal.

Durrani described the difficulty of designing the mold as being comparable to “the level of love and passion that would be put into a sonnet. There’s so much in this to make it work properly… these (pointing out curves, thicknesses, fillets, and radii in the wheel) are here for very, very critical reasons. There are 23 things I have identified that, if not done right, would produce a crack, every time.”


The speed with which this aspect of the wheel was accomplished was also unprecedented, according to Husky’s Stewart. “The mold for this wheel was done in five weeks… No one has ever done that for a magnesium thixomold. Typically you do a prototype tool first, and that takes months. Sheryar didn’t go that traditional route: he went right to the production tool, saving a lot of time and money due to his experience.”


Durrani expounded:“Getting that right normally takes six months for small parts, trying and retrying the placement and sizing of the overflows. The (mold design for) larger stuff could take people up to one and a half years. We were very, very detailed on the mathematics of it. This is epinephrine inducing, headache level, PhD math!”
Where do you get that skill? “After 20 years of doing nothing but magnesium and making it your one mission in life…then, you can do an application where your first shot is pretty damned close to where it needs to be.”

The artist's rendering

“We went from an artist’s rendering dated January 15, 2007 to computer aided design, and then Finite Element Analysis. We put the loads on it to see where the stresses were, and discovered that there was some twisting going on when cornering if it hit a bump, so we added a cross brace. It completely eliminated the problem and doubled the strength of the wheel.” After several speedy revisions, Husky received tooling on February 19th, and on February 28th, Durrani had his parts in hand.[BREAK=The Mag Hits the Fan]

Scrap Cores

The thixocores were tested by cutting samples, or ‘coupons’, and examining them under high magnification, by X-ray, through cycle fatigue and physical tri-axial loading tests. The core was an unqualified success. Whatever else may have gone wrong later, this unprecedented step was accomplished in the face of many doubts and with astonishing speed. It made others in the industry sit up and take notice. It attracted the attention of potential investors, and formed the basis of Durrani’s expectation of success with the rest of the wheel design. It would be as if you challenged a Champion boxer and knocked him on his ass a few times during the first round. Unfortunately, that early conquest was not necessarily a guarantee of future successes. The Champion, a certain Murphy S. Law whom many of us have met, made it up off the canvas to answer the bell for the next round, as usual.

The Mag Hits the Fan.

Durrani’s early accomplishment caused him to see things through what he would later call “the intoxication of the afterglow of this success.” This self-congratulatory inebriation coincided with the 2007 Indy Dealer’s show, where his infectious enthusiasm and charismatic, persuasive manner took him down a precipitous path that would later cause him a fair amount of misery.

About ‘That Ad.’

A few days before Durrani even had his first wheel core in hand, he went to the Indy Motorcycle Industry Show in order to make contacts with dealers and gauge their interest in adding the Durrani 510s to their line. The passion with which he spoke of the yet-to-be-produced wheels created a flood of interest.

During this event he met an editor of a print magazine who was very excited about the new wheel, particularly because his publication was wrapping up a special aftermarket wheel buyer’s guide, involving 21 companies. He said: “If you can get me something to photograph by the end of the month, I’d love to have you in there.” The idea emerged that Durrani could quickly prepare a mock-up prototype of a finished 510 wheel by gutting the spokes out of a standard cast aluminum wheel, replacing them with a thixocore, complete with hubs, and painting it in a way that would be representative of the finished product. With the editor advocating the case, the magazine agreed to hold publication for five days in order to get the first scoop on the new hoop.

Those Red Mockup Wheels

Out of gratitude for that consideration, Durrani rushed to make the mockup wheels and took the extra, fateful step of placing “The Ad”. Prominently displayed in that ad were the magic numbers $1098 (the subliminal connection to the most desirable Ducati in years was not coincidental). The interest and the orders immediately rolled in, just as Durrani Racing Components was rolling into their new shop.

[BREAK=Wheels of Fire]

Wheels of Fire

When I first interviewed Durrani in his shop on April 10, 2007, the newest piece of equipment in the place was an impressively high-tech coffee machine that brewed individual cups. The whole place was in the very early stages of gearing up for production. The prototype wheels, laser weldment samples and the latest iterations of the thixocores were in evidence. A sample of the super-deluxe boxes the wheels would be shipped in was on hand, but the CNC machines had not yet been delivered. The custom ring rolling apparatus was still being built, and the first delivery of extruded magnesium rim strips had just arrived that morning. It didn’t look much like a place that was going to be ready to deliver finished, tested wheels in a month, and Durrani admitted he was a few weeks behind schedule. Nevertheless, his overwhelming confidence and obvious pride in his vision for his company belied what appeared to be a lack of readiness.

Laser Welding Trial

I came back to the shop a few days later to photograph the guys rolling rims on the new, custom machine. Just a few days earlier, Durrani had commented on this challenge. “There’s a particular, small window of temperature at which you can roll magnesium effectively: that temperature is known to me and a very few others. You could find it by trial and error, but you would lose time and lots and lots of money figuring that out. It will definitely crack if pressure is applied at the wrong temperature.“

As Durrani explained it, the lengths of expensive extruded magnesium would be cut so there would be little or no waste: “We had to invent a machine to roll these rims from scratch, because current roll-forming technology was not sufficient…I had an epiphany about two months ago, (and this was part of the delay), that the current rolling technology leaves about 6 inches of straight material on each end…. that’s why no one has done anything like this before. Even with aluminum, you have to roll it big so you can trim the straight parts off and wrap it…the radius changes appropriately. If you bend it too much, you’re going to gyank it. (That’s the term of art, not a typo.) So what do you do? Six inches of scrap on both sides represents a lot of money laying on the floor. We had to come up with a way of getting a perfectly rolled wheel with zero scrap.”

The process was to involve heating a strip of magnesium to a specific temperature, and feeding that piece (now dramatically expanded in all dimensions) through rollers that were designed to accommodate the expanded piece. Before it cooled and contracted, it would be shaped into a complete hoop.

When I arrived at the shop that day, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a photo session. A strip of magnesium had lit off in the heater, and they hadn’t quite got it out the overhead door before it melted into a snapping heap of molten slag. The guys in the shop still seemed shell-shocked by the piercingly bright, violent conflagration, a repairman was re-wiring the heater, and people were trying to clean the scorched concrete floor amidst a lingering, strange odor.

That might have sent some people back to the drawing board in a reflective funk, but Sheryar was triumphantly holding the two solidified pieces of crisped metal like Moses descending Mount Sinai, pointing out that they bore a distinct resemblance to the two peninsulas of the State of Michigan. “It’s a sign!” he said. “We’re going to revive the economy of the whole state with this technology!”

I thought, ‘Well, that’s leadership.’ …or possibly, a level of faith I am not used to encountering, or evidence of delusion, or genuine hubris. Or maybe that’s just the way a true inventor sees things.

Michigan in Magnesium hanging in Durrani's office.

Ring rolling proved to be a huge challenge. As Durrani struggled, the delays compounded, and the number of phone calls and Internet catcalls increased exponentially. In the same way that the residual odor of the fire pervaded the building, the question of whether Durrani shrewdly cashed the credit cards in order to use other people’s money to fund his development clung to, and in many people’s minds defined, the enterprise bearing his name.

Gyanked. - a Sign of Things to Come

Part 1 - World of Wheels
Part 2 - Invention and Inventor
Part 4 - Durrani Looks Back from Jan, 2008 - Taking the Blame
Part 5 - Durrani Looks Ahead - Lessons Learned?

Parts 4 and 5, consisting of the January 2008 interviews, should be up Easter Weekend. Durrani answers all questions about what went wrong and what he intends to do next.