All evidence to the contrary, I have started writing again. I teamed up with my pal Lou Kren to collaborate on an article for one of his ventures. I am my toughest critic – but I am very pleased with my work with Lou.

I also have no less than 5 book concepts in the works. At the rate I am going, it will take a couple years to get it all out there – but am close to getting the first one going. It will most likely be an engineering calculations-focused book.

I feel good overall – and I genuinely believe I am doing my best work ever.

That said, did you know that Vince Lombardi prepared his entire career to be a head coach? And no less than 20 years into his journey, he finally got the opportunity with the Green Bay Packers and helped put the NFL on the map. [my prediction is they will be in this year's Superbowl and walk away with the Lombardi trophy]

We are approaching the 25 year mark on my career. Does my dream job of building a championship-caliber die engineering and build team with owning the quoting method and die standards lurk on the horizon?

If I had THAT opportunity, the possibilities are boundless. I foresee a reversal of work going overseas back to my hometown with the right die engineering and build processes with my brand of modern die standards to guide the efforts.

I do not know if 2011 is my year or not, but I know this: I am having fun right now.

Case in point: advanced feasibility of metal stampings.

Here is a situation where the product geometry, material type, and material thickness is far from frozen. “Frozen” is an automotive term for final designs that are released for production. Final, in this market, means “design intent will most likely change unless hell freezes over”.

At this point in the product development process, someone somewhere is simply looking for feasibility. Not validation.

The formability and proposed process is all we are looking for here. Is it a crash form or a form or a multi-stage draw?

Will it run in a progressive die or transfer?

Hell, even a rough blank size and budgetary tool cost may be required as well. Rough does not mean down to two place decimals on dimensions. Budgetary does not mean down to plus or minus 2 cents.

And that is my two cents: getting down to the level of detail of sourcing blank suppliers, getting 57 people to sign-off on a process that stands a 90% chance of never turning into a job for a product design that stands a 99.9% chance changing somehow someway to make all the advanced work a complete waste of time.

Focus on what matters. Don’t go overboard.

Commodity codes suck, and I will tell you why: they are completely useless.

Every company that needs sheet steel to manufacture products buys the same steel from the same material manufacturers. Commodity codes are a reference to an existing material that the company will purchase.

Die engineers need material properties to do their job effectively. It takes longer to cross-reference some bullshit commodity code to something meaningful than it does to do the job itself.

Here is an idea: create a universally-recognized generic smart code for each material. By smart I mean include the abbreviation for the material type and grade plus the tensile strength.

So, instead of a commodity code like SPX28975AFU, I would have S-DP-500 for Dual Phase Steel with a tensile strength of 500 MPa.

From there, I not only know generally what the material is, I can also get the material properties I need without guessing.

It seems to me that the reason that the restrike is more appealing and rational than the trim line correction…

by creating an adjustment point closer to the final destination (the conveyor belts and the racks) they are able to affect the “illusion” of control over some of the variation. To address the initial form or flange die may require the definition of a different tip angle, or inclusion of a CAM that was not originally part of that planned operation. Additionally, fudging a “calibration” hit or tweaking the restrike may have far less negative impact on the overall behavior of the panel.

I am not defending it, but I can see the safety-blanket-like appeal of using the purpose-built restrike die as a control point. A tool that if the attempt at re-cutting or shimming or welding up or just plain hard hitting the tool away from original design intent will not have as broad or potentially negative impact on larger portions of the product. severely mess with the restrike and you are not messing with the product.

Similar to the concept of double draw beads used in large panel draws. We know that square lock beads can effectively lock out all material flow, and that grinding on those square beads can affect all gradients of restraint until the bead is gone. However, we still see double draw beads and the significantly larger blanks that they require in production. Why? Because if I have to make adjustments to the material flow, it feels like we can safely grind and weld on one of the two drawbeads without drastically altering the die. While grinding on the ONLY drawbead feels more risky.

Rational yes, but still an illusion of control.

What folks need to be able to do more effectively during their engineering of the PROCESS and all the tools in the entire process, is to meaningfully evaluate not just what the die does in the best/worst/nominal cases that they might be simulating as their standard. But they need to consider what happens when the world changes slightly around them-as it will. In springback there is no Best or Worst case.

Different is Different. And when it comes to springback any difference can end up being wrong. The restrike die just gives us one more bite at the apple to fix what we could not stabilize in the initial hit and when it appears to fix the problem at buy-off via tweaking, it actually becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will prove by having it that we needed it. Vicious cycle, the only good news is that we might get paid to make the restrike die, so I don’t foresee the world doing away with them.

Good points, Eric. But with Obama now wanting more aggressive CAFE standards in the next 20 years, the only profitable way to stamp automotive vehicles is to get away from the unnecessary bells and whistles like restrike dies and just-in-case cam operations.

Costing is not quoting.

The calculated or estimated cost has no practical relation to the quoted price for two reasons.

First, the price that will win the work relies exclusively on what the customer is willing to pay. End of story.

The customer does not care that it will cost the die shop $500,000 USD to build if they are willing to pay only $400,000 USD for the job.

Even if your costing software is accurate to +/-0.005%, a cost of anything over $400,000 USD is a loser.

Second, most die shops have no real clue as to what their geniune costs are. At the quoting level, it is guesswork.

At the historical level, the data is usually poorly tracked, collected, and reconciled. The historical data should be the baseline for future work. Without this important data, all decisions moving forward are simply guesses.

Again, even if the historical data was valid and the costing method – software or otherwise – was accurate, the only thing that matters is quoting the maximum that the customer is willing to pay and work like the devil to reduce costs once the quote becomes an order.