Page 19 - MetalForming May 2019

Determining how dies, parts, transfer mechanisms and the press interact provides opportunities to make part transfer more effi- cient. Changes to press settings and minor die modifications can deliver significant speed improvement.
tomers to achieve higher strokes/min., many times without doing anything with the tooling. From there, we can identify other fixes, such as moving a pin or grinding a chamfer, and show on a computer screen how these efforts gain even more strokes/min. Taking these solutions to the shop floor proves everything out.”
Big Savings Over Production Lifetime
A 15 to 20-percent output improvement may mean only 2 strokes/min., but over the course of production and the lifetime of a job, such improvement can save thousands of dollars. Rine reports that some Tier One automotive suppliers have incorporated this type of transfer optimization into their standards, recognizing the ROI.
Die Cad Group and Rine provide numerous examples to prove the payback—in tool design and transfer optimization. In one case, Rine offers, “a metal former contacted us to analyze a design provided by another company, asking us to run it through T-Sim. In doing so, we discovered a major issue involving the die castings, which would mean a total rework—very costly and time-consuming. T-Sim allowed us
to point out the issue before the tooling was built.”
In another, a customer forwarded Die Cad Group a transfer
job quoted at 14 strokes/min. but only running at 11.
“If we could just increase output to the quoted level, the customer would be happy,” Rine recalls. “After an initial run through T-Sim, we found that just changing some press settings would deliver 16 strokes/min., resulting in a 31- percent improvement. We performed another run and sug- gested a few tool changes—nothing major—to bring output to 19 strokes/min. This part run totals about 100,000/yr., so over a 6-yr. program, savings reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. And again, results on the floor prove out these
simulations.
“It sounds like a no-brainer,” Rine continues, “but for
metal formers to achieve such savings, they must slow down enough to examine the problem, and provide accurate press, tool and transfer system information. Given that, the software
will perform successfully.”
MF
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