CravenSpeed Dev Blog

Greetings Everyone! Steve with CravenSpeed here. I wanted to take a few minutes and introduce you to our latest product for the ND MX-5 Mazda Miata. We here at CravenSpeed love our ND MX-5 and developing new parts for it has always been a fun, eye-opening experience. Those folks at Mazda really know what they’re doing and every time we take something apart, we marvel at the engineering that went into a particular piece of it. However, it seems that there’s always going to be something that can be improved upon and the heavy factory pulleys are one of those areas that could use a little of the ‘CravenSpeed touch’. We have a fairly extensive history of making lightweight pulleys and they’ve proven to be a great way to recover some lost power from spinning the OEM crankshaft and accessory pulleys. This 3-piece kit consists of a crankshaft, water pump, and an alternator pulley. These lightweight pulleys are precision machined out of 6061 aluminum, so they’re perfectly balance...

I have to get one more historical (and on-going) project out of the way before I'll feel really caught up enough to talk about current product development. Here at CravenSpeed we fold about 150k boxes a year, and have I mentioned lately we do it all in Portland, OR? Doing this stateside means it costs us a pretty penny in labor for our thumbs-only origami efforts. Enter, the box folding machine. We've been working on this thing for about 2 years, off and on, mostly off. But now that it's in production, it's become a bit like a pet horse; we all love it because it works hard for us, and we also suspect that it's smarter than it lets on, but it is a hungry beast that needs to be fed constantly.           Before getting started, we did some time trials and we discovered that a person can fold one of these boxes in 7 to 10 seconds, which is much faster than it works out to in a 8 hour shift because people can't (or won't) keep that pace f...

Hello world. We decided to flush our old blog and jump in fresh, coinciding with moving into our new digs. A lot has happened since the last entry, which involved an electric mini (which has since been gutted and reverted back to dino-fuels), and our OBD Gauges. The OBD gauges were put on the back-burner for a number of reasons I also won't go into, but if you're curious, buy me a beer sometime and I'm sure I'll tell you everything you want to know and more.           I digress. At CravenSpeed we've had some sustained growth that we're uber proud of, which has made us crazy busy, but also forced us to move our facilities for the 5th time since we started this thing up 12 years ago. A quick walk down memory lane... All the inventory in the garage Our first place was tiny and no bathroom The next place was a huge, but we filled it fast. The next was 5,500sqft and felt yuge!       ...