Atlas 4sp Transfer Case

When Advance Adapters released its newest creation, the four-speed Atlas 4SP transfer case, we just had to get a look behind the scenes at what went into it. Our curiosity took us to Advance Adapters' home base in Paso Robles, California. The facility was awesome, full of eye candy that any hard-core wheeler could appreciate, with everything from custom company-owned project rigs to a machine shop containing $100,000 CNC machines, gear cutting equipment, and enough raw aluminum material to make a soda can for Paul Bunyan. Needless to say, we were impressed by our tour. Coincidentally, while we were there, a few of the 40 Advance Adapters staff were assembling the new Atlas transfer cases. So we asked if we could tag along and document the process. Check out what we learned.

Advance Adapters receives approximately 100 castings with each shipment. The process begins with castings. These come from Advance Adapters' Southern California foundry in approximately 100-piece lots. These castings are first inspected and then prepped for finish machining.	Here, a $72,000 Hass three-axis CNC machine prepares one Atlas case for assembly. Each case spends about one hour on this machine. All Atlas castings are made from high-quality 356-T6 aluminum.	Meanwhile, on the other side of the building, a gear-cutting machine is removing material from an output shaft for one of nearly 2,000 different Atlas configurations.
Finished cases are inspected again for issues, palletized, and transferred to the assembly area.	Here, the billet planetary housings are having gears pressed into them.	With gears pressed in place, these planetary housings are ready for assembly.
These are front output shafts prior to gear cutting and heat treatment. A batch like this will typically take around six weeks to manufacture.	Prior to assembly, each case receives a 140-degree solvent bath to remove any loose shavings and/or foreign materials. The heat also aids with the assembly process because the aluminum actually expands slightly. Our assembly technician Jordan Lester also told us the heat makes the cases nice to work with during the colder winter months.	Each assembly technician has a personalized work station with plenty of space to lay out, organize, and put together each of the three subassemblies that are required for each case. Here you can see one of Lester's assembly tables with most of the internal parts ready to go.