Engineering Decisions, Rants, Tips & Techniques 
4 Comments Motor City Squares
My view of dies is their architecture should be driven by both the production volume and material strength of the stampings. Unfortunately, this is fuzzy in practice. Many die standards and quoting systems do not take both into account.
The illustration below captures how I believe dies should be built based on the combination of production life and material strength:
There are three main categories of architectures: Low, Standard, and High. It works like this: Depending on the combination of production volume and material tensile strength, the low and high architectures are variations of what you would consider a typical or standard die to look like. The Low variety uses less inserts and lower grade materials. The High variety uses more inserts and higher grade materials to sustain the tool under high force and high hits conditions.
is not strength of metal only part of the story?
Thickness too plays a role, or am i misinterpreting the calculations you have given before regarding die load as a function of Thickness AND Strength?
how about the vertical axis is = t * Strength = MPa x mm = N/mm ?
Also, you label it as TS (UTS below 100MPa is pretty rare for Ferrous materials), is this your intent? or did you mean Yield Strength, or UTS, or something different all together?
hey Eric,
I am not talking about absolutes here … talking concept.
That said, there is a hell of alot more to the die world than ferrous and automotive – but they have the same problem as automotive: over-built dies.
The problem automotive is starting to face now is under-built dies due to material properties … but that is a deeper discussion beyond my thoughts today.
Sure … material thickness is a potential factor, but that is too detailed for where I am going conceptually.
Use whatever numbers you want … my goal was to show three core architectures and what to do if you have a HSS part that runs 10,000 parts versus 10 million.
concept is sound, did not dispute that…
just asking a question…. and still not sure if you meant TS, UTS, or yield (the miscommunication of this is part of many over/under engineering issues in tooling)
will disagree with your response: thickness is not too detailed after all, in most cases if the designer is looking for mass reduction by using HSS, the thickness reduction is major part of design criteria. Doubling the strength and halving the thickness requires different architecture than tripling Strength and only reducing thickness 25%, and I interpreted that as an important aspect or your post conceptual intent. (or was I reading into it too much by assuming that your insights were looking deeper….)
kisses and hugs
Dude … you are going way deeper than the intent of where I was going with this … you bring up good points, but are beyond the scope of the message I wanted to deliver.
Glad to see you are thinking critically about this.
You should get your own blog and delve deeper into this stuff.