How to reduce the cost of mold development

With the rapid development of the manufacturing industry, how to reduce the long development cycle and high cost of molds has become a new goal that everyone is pursuing.

product design

1, plate selection

Under the premise of satisfying the requirement of complete vehicle strength, companies should adopt the more common and mature technologies in the market. For example, one of the company's former anti-collision beam inner panel materials used the Swedish knife-cut material DOCO860. Due to the high strength of the sheet metal, the open-back springback of the mold developed according to the general process was 8mm, and the arc rebounded up to 15mm. For these problems, we can only conduct multiple tests through rebound compensation. This not only results in a long cycle but also material waste.

2, product structure

When developing multiple models, more consideration should be given to the versatility of the product. In addition, the product must be simplified in structure to avoid increased mold operations or complicated mold structures.

3, the application of synchronous engineering

Press Synchronization Engineering (SE) is the product design stage, stamping process technicians involved in early product analysis, eliminate errors and defects in the design stage, shorten the mold development cycle. As can be seen from the figure, the use of simultaneous engineering eliminates one process step, making tooling production begin in the shortest possible time, providing sufficient time for manufacturing.

Production Process

There are two types of production lines currently used by enterprises: manual production lines and automatic production lines. In terms of automatic lines, in order to ensure the automatic slippage of production waste, the angle between the slide plate and the table must be greater than 20°, plus the automatic line mold feeding height requirements are consistent, in order to ensure that the waste material can slide freely, must increase the height of all molds . However, for the whole vehicle, reducing the height of the mold is an effective way to save the cost of mold development. With manual production lines there are no issues involved. Each company can choose the production method and production equipment according to its own situation, and ultimately achieve small input and large output. Aluminum spot welding machine

Mold manufacturing

1, mold process

(1) Consider the blanking process first, and then consider the drawing process. With the application of high-strength steel plate in automobile production, in order to ensure the high-strength sheet can be formed, the forming method with blanking has a higher chance of success, blanking and drawing. Compared with no blank holders, material utilization is greatly improved. However, the drawing process is easy to ensure product quality, and the debugging cycle can be shortened. Therefore, both should be considered together to develop the optimal process.

(2) Blanking using a nesting process After the blanking of some parts, the scrap can be reused to produce small parts of the same material.

(3) Maximize the requirement of clamping the left and right parts or the mode of multiple cavities The products we develop are almost symmetric. If the left and right parts are to be produced in the mold, only the symmetry of the width (length) of the individual parts will be added. The dimensions of the piece are the dimensions of the mold for the new process. In comparison, a set of guide mechanisms can be saved, and the weight of the overall mold can also be reduced. For narrow and long parts, it is recommended to use a mode of multi-cavity production.

2, mold design

Some structures are redundant in the design of mold structures. For example, in order to ensure the smoothness of the pickup, the pneumatic top loading device is often reserved on the mold, which is hardly used in actual production.

The service life of the mold directly affects the material selection of the mold. Our company generally requires the service life of the mold to be 500,000 punches, but in the current multi-species, medium and small batch production, the service life of the mold continues to be 500,000 times. This is unreasonable. The mold wall thickness can be appropriately reduced to reduce costs.

Now our country has a low level of casting and it is difficult to achieve mixed casting. In the case of burring molds, high hardness and wear-resistant materials such as GM series, MOGR alloys, and air-cooled steels are generally used in the work part. By adopting a mosaic structure and satisfying the high life requirements of the mold, an integral insert or an integral insert can be selected according to the size of the parts required in the working part.

There are many factors that affect the cost of mold manufacturing. The actual situation of each company is different, and the requirements for mold products are not the same. These are some suggestions based on the actual analysis and summary of our factory. I hope that I can give my colleagues a little inspiration.