As a treat, we got to visit Tomei’s facility located in Machida City, a suburb in Western Tokyo. Most of you know of Tomei as the supplier of top quality engine internals, such as cranks, rods, pistons, and camshafts as well as complete engines. Tomei also makes excellent exhaust systems, headers and turbo upgrades. We were very eager to get to see just what was inside the walls of there headquarters.
Tomei was founded 52 years ago in 1968 as a racing engine and parts supplier focusing mainly on Nissan cars. Tomei has grown to a much larger company with 22 employees that has developed parts for many different Japanese engines from Mitsubishis to Subarus and supplying engines and parts to companies like Nismo, OS Gikken, Kaaz and Weds.
We started out by checking out Tomei’s showroom. One thing that we found interesting is how small everything is. Japan is a crowed densely populated island country and space is at a premium. Real estate prices are also sky high so getting the most out of floor space is a big deal. The showroom was tiny but a lot of interesting things were crammed in here.
Most of Tomei’s upgrades emphasize balanced performance over impressive horsepower numbers. The turbo upgrades displayed here for engines from the 4G63 to various Kei cars (the smallest category of road-legal cars with engines 660cc and smaller) emphasize wide powerband and minimal lag over maximum peak power.
Here is a cutaway of a complete Tomei Genisis Mitsubishi 4B11. Genesis engines feature forged cranks, rods, pistons with headwork and cams. The engines are built for durability and driveability over peak power. We guess an analogy would be what the factory would do if they engineered higher output models of there engines.
2 comments
TOMEI is one of those aftermarket names I was familiar with but had no experience with. It’s nice to see how much R&D they put into their products. Great article!
Super cool! Thanks for the tour.