Tooling & Production - May/June 2009 - (Page 28)
re-tooling strategies From 12 hrs to 25 mins Giant steps for faster cavity hogging, square-offs follow re-tooling T o deliver sooner and stay cost-competitive, often the smartest move a diversified stamping house can make is to speed up the tool and diemaking. Joe Krish, manufacturing engineer at Boehm Pressed Steel, Valley City, OH, recognizes this more than most. Cavities that once took Boehm 12 hours to rough out are done in 25 minutes. Diestocks for slides, cams, gibs, punch holders, and punch and die bodies are squared off in less than half the time as before. Annual savings are estimated to top $200,000 a year. Perhaps more crucial, turnaround times for new or modified tooling — and the stampings they produce — are shortened by days or weeks. Better answers sooner Krish’s solution was to retool the two mainstay milling operations based on the advice of field engineers from Ingersoll Cutting Tools and their distributor, Jergens Inc. “Reaching out for help early got us up to speed months sooner than going it alone,” Krish said. “There are simply too many choices in tooling and machine settings to keep up with ourselves. “It could have taken us a year of researching and testing,” he explained. “Instead, we began to benefit in a matter of weeks.” Krish realized the strategic value of speeding up the front end first. “In a stamping house, there’s more room for speed and cost improvement in the toolroom than in the pressroom, especially if you have a reputation to protect in deep drawing, as we most certainly do,” he said. Boehm prides itself on holding tight tolerances and fine finishes on deep-drawn stampings. On one long-term job for an automaker, Boehm deep-draws bearing pockets to +/0.0015". By nature, deep-drawing dies involve much more development work than piercing and bending. Inevitably, developing deep-drawing tools involves extensive milling. Boehm’s toolroom is a 10/6 operation, supporting a 50-man, 40,000sqft pressroom with presses up to 600 ton. The company also prowww.ToolingAndProduction.com A mainstay operation, cavity and profile milling runs 16 times faster than before on deep drawing dies. Switching to Ingersoll PowerFeed+ mill improved turnaround time for completed diesets, leading to quicker delivery of finished stampings. The steps he has taken in the captive die shop of this diversified stamping house have lopped thousands of hours a year out of two mainstay tool and diemaking operations: cavity hogging and squaring-off diestock. A more agile die shop can punch out a first stamping sooner and deliver the whole lot on a tighter schedule. More importantly, the company can commit to tighter schedules more confidently at bid time, and win more business. 28 May/June 2009
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