Family tooling is when a manufacturer designs and makes a die that can create multiple parts in different ways simultaneously. People use family tooling for a good reason: family dies save money. The cost is also one of the problems with running family dies for metal stamping.
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How Do You Do Metal Stamping?
Hot metal stamping is a way of making things that use one metal stamping die, or a series of metal stamping dies to change the size and shape of a flat piece of metal into something with three dimensions.
Features of Stamping
When compared to other ways of processing, it has the following technical and financial features:
(1) The mould ensures that stamped parts are the right size because it has the same features. This makes the quality stable and the parts easy to swap out.
(2) Parts with thin walls, lightweight, high surface quality, good rigidity, and complex shapes that are hard or impossible to make with other processing methods can be made with metal stamping.
(3) Stamping doesn’t usually need to heat the blank or cut a lot of metal as cutting does, so it saves energy and metal.
(4) A regular press can make a few pieces per hour, but a high-speed press can make tens of thousands of pieces per hour.
So, it is an effective way to process.
Because the stamping process has all these essential features, it is used in almost every part of the economy.
For instance, stamping processing is used in aerospace, electronic, machinery, weapons, household appliances, transportation, and the light industry.
Not only is it used a lot in business, but everyone has something to do with stamping daily.
Stamping can make small parts for clocks, watches, and instruments and large parts for cars and tractors, like covers.
As stamping materials, you can use ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals, and even things that aren’t made of metal.
Advantages of Family Tooling
• With a family tool, several parts can be made simultaneously. One clear benefit of this is that it cuts production time, lowering the overall cost.
• A well-designed family die a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. Each component is laid out in such a way that it can be stamped using as little raw material as feasible without compromising on fit. Of course, when there is less wastage, the cost of materials goes down.
Even though using tools from around the house can save money, it can also increase the price for either the manufacturer or the customer. You can’t separate the parts of a family tool. So, if something goes wrong with one of the parts after production, all of the parts must be stamped again. Often, these things can’t be predicted or avoided, and that’s the risk of using family dies for metal stamping.
Family Tooling Disadvantages
• If the lousy part was made wrong, the company that created it has to pay to make the wrong part and all the other parts in the same family. In other words, the cost of fixing a problem with one part of the die is multiplied by the number of different parts in the family tool.
• The customer may also have to pay extra. If one of the parts needs to be redesigned after the production specs have been approved, the customer is responsible for the costs of the redesigned part and the costs of the following parts in the die. Also, if a customer needs more than one part of the family to die for any reason like if their stock was lost or damaged in their warehouse, the only way to get them is to re-stamp every part made in the family die.
Conclusion
Running metal stamping family dies saves time and money, which is obvious. However, a family die’s design that helps it save money can also be its Achilles’ heel. The tool that is supposed to save money at the beginning of a project can cost more than it was supposed to. Remember that family of parts is what matters most when stamping metal with family dies.
Also Read: Which Metals Work Best For Producing Stamping Parts?
