Test of Time

Posted by stephens on Sep 3, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Events, Tips & Techniques | 0 comments

While thumbing through the GM Die Standards last night, two things were lost upon me until that moment. One is that I am the last surviving industry active person to have written a die standards book for an OEM. From scratch. I guess that is kind of like being the oldest person alive in a morbid way. The second is the organization of the book is still relevant...

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Motor City Squares

Posted by stephens on Aug 2, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Rants, Tips & Techniques | 4 comments

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...

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Light Cars. Heavy Dies

Posted by stephens on May 14, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Events, Rants | 2 comments

Dan Grieshaber gave a presentation titled Lightweighting Automotive Body: Enablers and Manufacturing Challenges at the Great Designs in Steel 2010 event. As I have mentioned before, I genuinely thought Dan did a fabulous job of presenting. His slide presentation was generally good. He spoke freely without notes or a script. Dan was relaxed and knew his topic...

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Eye Candy

Posted by stephens on Apr 22, 2010 in Demos, Web Technologies | 0 comments

Here is some eye candy for you die guys out there: Speaking of eye candy, it is about time I update the look and feel of this site. I like this one, but I want to take it to the next level. Look for a new theme in a week or...

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Best of Both Worlds

Posted by stephens on Apr 10, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Web Technologies | 2 comments

A big thank you to everyone that posted comments and emailed me about my website naming question. The “vote” results were pretty much split down the middle: diejedi.com (60%) diestandards.com (40%) dies-inc.com (0%) Fellow die guy Eric Kam mentioned something this week that helped pull it all together conceptually in my mind. Essentially, he said...

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Need Help With A Name

Posted by stephens on Apr 8, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Events | 10 comments

Let’s say you are a stamping die designer or builder and want to use a blog-type website for searchable and relevant die engineering standards and publications that are accessible from a web browser or smart phone. Maybe you are a die shop, components supplier, or services company in the stamping die fabrication market that wants to advertise on a site...

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Die Standards for the 21st Century

Posted by stephens on Mar 30, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Rants, Web Technologies | 0 comments

I remember telling the GM Die Standards Task Force that the die standards should be published as a searchable web-based tool instead of the traditional static paper document in a three ring binder. That was 1992. For the past 15 years, it has been a static PDF document. Hoo-ha. Why not publish die standards using Wordpress blog technology? I have spent my entire...

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Next

Posted by stephens on Mar 9, 2010 in Engineering Decisions, Tips & Techniques | 0 comments

I blogged a while back about the changes we made to automotive die standards that inadvertently revolutionized how dies are designed and built. As promised, here is the long awaited list of top 10 things I would do today, in no particular order, if given a clean sheet to re-write die standards: Screws: Use M10 socket head cap screws for everything and fewer of...

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Dreams

Posted by stephens on Nov 25, 2009 in Engineering Decisions, Events | 0 comments

I am preparing a post for changes I feel need to be made to automotive stamping die engineering standards. The next revolution. There are many things on my mind these days. Dies, at this point in my life, are more of a casual hobby than the obsession they used to be. That said, I had a dream last night that Chris Colley and I were going to re-write die...

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Broken Rules

Posted by stephens on Nov 10, 2009 in Engineering Decisions, Tips & Techniques | 0 comments

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: Units: went from 75 years of inch-pound to hard metric to save 30% in component costs. Casting: reduced casting by 60% by going from 3 inch walls to 45 mm. Coring: simplified the...

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