Die Guy

I mentioned in my previous post about how our die standards completely changed the way automotive dies were designed and built. Here are 13 the rules we broke to create new ones:

1. Units: went from 75 years of inch-pound to hard metric to save 30% in component costs.
2. Casting: reduced casting by 60% by going from 3 inch walls to 45 mm.
3. Coring: simplified the design by coring up from the panel instead of away from the panel.
4. Decisions: used production volume and material thickness to drive architecture.
5. Choices: gave the engineers first, second, and last choice options for design.
6. Springs: eliminated die springs and used less expensive fiber-belted springs.
7. Fitting: fitted sculptured surface at the working areas only instead of entire panel.
8. Adapters: eliminated the use of adapters for final adjustment due to NC machining.
9. Inserts: stopped fully inserting trims and forms to cut or form on cast posts.
10. Heels: eliminated heels on die sets and used guide pins only.
11. Plates: eliminated wear plates on pads and used guide pins only.
12. Lifters: adopted the “no lifter is the best lifter” policy.
13. Manifolds: abandoned nitrogen manifolds in favor of self-contained gas springs.

Clearly, all these changes favor the die shop. The tradeoff is there is more maintenance for the production source.

From an economic standpoint, it is better to spend less capital on the front end and pay for maintenance out of stamped profit during the life of the tool.

Tags: die standards, engineering rules

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Engineering Decisions, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.