Page 21 - MetalForming September 2014

aluminum content per vehicle will be 44 lb. in 2015, a 13-percent jump from 2014. The increase rises to 28 percent for North American light vehicles.
Cut to the chase: For OEMs and their suppliers, process improvements to reduce scrap/offal will take on a whole new level of importance. For metal stampers in particular, this emphasis already has impacted a rapidly expand- ing trend toward transfer dies and their close relative, the coil-fed or prog-to- transfer die. So says Linear Transfer Automation’s vice president of sales Paul Stirrett:
“As material costs rise due to ad- vanced steels in recent years and the coming trend toward aluminum, the floodgates have been opened for trans-
By 2025, it’s predicted that more than
75 percent of all new pickup trucks pro- duced in North America will comprise aluminum bodies, and 26.6 percent of all body and closure parts for light vehicles will be made of aluminum. That trend, along with increased consumption of pricey advanced high-strength steels, raises expectations for improving material utilization in the stamping process.
Hence the growing trend toward the use of prog-to-transfer dies.
fer companies,” Stirrett says. “In our case, we’re producing three times as many systems we did just a few years ago, and I believe that’s true for other trans- fer companies as well. OEMs are asking their Tier suppliers to move toward transfer dies to save material, and that trend will only grow as materials become more exotic and expensive.”
Taking Transfer to a Whole New Level
Some in the industry—the “top stampers” as Stirrett calls them—are taking transfer to a new level by engi- neering dies that combine the charac- teristics of a progressive die (coil fed) and a transfer die. Using this prog-to- transfer process allows the stamper to optimally nest the blanks in the coil and then use in-die automation to manipulate the separated blanks—sep- arate and rotate—for the transfer process.
“This optimizes material utilization to levels never seen before,” says Stir- rett. “We first saw the process start to take hold 3 or 4 yr. ago and it’s really taken off in the last year or two.”
For an up-close perspective on the prog-to-transfer process, Stirrett hooked us up with fellow Canadian company Egar Tool and Die, Cam- bridge, Ontario, who he says helped to pioneer the concept back in 2010. Egar is part die shop part stamper, with four production presses from 400 to 1200 ton. Its two largest presses—a 1000- metric-ton PTC (84 by 180 in.) and a 1200-ton Blow (80 by 180 in.)—feature three-axis Linear Transfer servo-based automation systems. They also include 72-in. coil-feed lines accepting coils to 50,000 lb.
Egar produces some 15 million stamped parts/yr. Of its 150 part num- bers in production (95 percent for auto- motive customers), one-third are stamped in prog-to-transfer dies. One die designer at Egar is responsible for designing 80 percent of those dies: Colin Kools.
Egar is part die shop part stamper, with four production presses from 400 to 1200 ton. Its two largest presses—a 1000-metric-ton PTC (shown) and a 1200-ton Blow—feature three-axis Linear Transfer servo-based automation sys- tems. They also include 72-in. coil-feed lines accepting coils to 50,000 lb.
www.metalformingmagazine.com MetalForming/September 2014 19