Scooter, here is a real simple die I made 20 years ago. I was making a new body panel for a 1912 car, and it needed a 1/4" bead around all four sides of a rectangle. I used a bead roller for most of it but as you know, it won't do an intersecting 90* beads. So I then just used this small die in all four corners to connect the long beads and get a tight 90* . Dies made from 1/2" steel plate. Then mark out where the centers of each bead in each plate. Now make a 1/16" deep hacksaw cut on all four lines. Clamp or tack them together so you can drill down through those saw lines in a drill press. The saw line kept the drill tracking good. Now bend some 1/4" round stock and fit it in one half and sweat solder it to the plate. It only needed to be good enough to work on this one part, so I did not make aligning plates...I should have because it was hard to get them both aligned.
As for the hardness of the dies, I suspect that you won't be using them to 'shear' the sheetmetal, and similarly, you're not after perfect precision corners if it's simple radiused corners you intend to form, hence, grab some MS plate and have a go. For small run's of simple shapes that don't have sharp corners, but simple curves, I think you'll be fine. Jump in and show us what you're making Cheers, Drewfus
No sharp corners. Everything is heavily radiused. No shearing of anything. I'll show you guys what I'm up to... ...Eventually. Have to figure OUT what I'm doing first. One thing is for sure, I have no plans of CNC machining these dies. The basic shapes will be machined on the mill and then the details will be fined tuned and polished by hand with die grinders and files.
I think that was me. Thats a great little setup. I'd tried a few louvers by pre-sliting using a cut off blade and then a hammer form for the shape, but they were just too variable and ended up looking like ****. Yours look great.
I'm going to guess that it's one of 2 things * Exhaust components/transitions * Intake manifold plates (to make your own log manifold)
I worked in one shop and we used to "recycle" old die sets just like you've shown. Just build up a new set of sub plates that mount to the die set plates. We used a hand arbor press as well as our larger hydraulic ones. Bob
You can use the rubber, or more correctly urethane as the female half of the die set. It comes in a great variety of hardnesses, so you may have to experiment a little. We always had it around in one shop I worked in and we'd just drop a piece into a pocket in the lower die half. Bob
In all seriousness, though... Nobody else has really tried to draw their own parts at home with limited resources and materials?? There's gotta' be more of ya'!
I've done it in shops for quick & dirty jobs. We had aluminum boxes laying around with urethane inserts in them for just that purpose. We'd make up dies even out of aluminum, mount them in a power brake and go to town. The cool part about the urethane is when you pull up the male die, the part self-ejects. Bob
For the Urethane, what durometer are we talking here?? Seems like that would be kind of challenging to secure when shaping/machining the female portion.
These are standard die shop urethanes, no idea what the durometer numbers were offhand. It was supplied around 3-4" thick and we simply made up 5-sided aluminum bar stock boxes to surround the urethane or sometimes used the urethane alone for something even quicker and dirtier. Here's a couple of good links to get you going. Bob http://www.thefabricator.com/article/bending/urethane-tooling-for-radius-bending-on-press-brakes# http://urethanetooling.com/utecinfo.htm
Scott, To be able to make your part without the metal being pulled into the female die and causing wrinkles you have to clamp the material around the female die shape before the male die is inserted. This is what Toner283 is showing in his drawing, the draw bead locks the material around the female die cir***ference and then the male die draws the metal into the shape. You may be able to do this by making your set up a three piece deal, the lower male die, a middle clamp plate that has the shape of the part cut through it and maybe .06 larger, then the male die which would be the depth of the part you want to draw plus the thickness of the clamp plate. You could bolt the clamp plate, the material to be formed and the female die together using some good bolts, the through bolt hole would also align the clamp plate and the female die then stick the male die in and press it. You might need to have alignment pins for the male die but I bet if you have the cut out in the clamp plate close you could "eye ball" it and make it work. One thing about the clamp plate that you could also try is to use some 10 or 12 gage solid copper wire and shape it around the opening on the female die, then put the blank over the wire and then bolt the clamp plate on this will have the affect of giving you a clamping bead in your part and you can experiment with the distance of the wire to the edge of the female die to affect the final part draw. If you used the copper wire idea then you could cut the shape in the clamp plate to be very close the the dimensions of the male die and you would not need any guide for the male die. This is certainly not a high production process but it should work and I would just use mild steel for all of the parts and lots of die lube. Rex
WOW! Now THERE'S some interesting information!!! That gave me some ideas for some OTHER parts I was going to make another way. Now I have know how to do it THAT way! OOOO!!! Very cool!! Seriously! Some great information from everyone here!! Keep it coming!
Probably lots of 'us' with projects that yielded less-than-spectacular results. I have built a couple of quick and dirty die sets with very mixed results. One project, pressing about ¾" deep into lite gauge mild steel, tried to tear the sheet around the edges....that project went back on the shelf, but with all of this new found info I might have to dig it out. .
I made a little bit of tooling to bend a steel strap into a sharp cornered U shape, with the bend a specific distance from one hole. I spent a couple hours making the dies by welding chunks of various shapes of steel together, then used my cheezy hydraulic press to form the parts. I only used it a dozen times. But not long ago I was thinking about pressing some parts for a friend, an aluminum ring with two flanges, for the ends of an rc airplane muffler. I need to get back on that....
There's some good info too! Thanks Rex!!! I like the copper wire idea as well! I could ball mill a receiving groove to keep the wire in position. Going to do some more sketching today... Thinking it would be worth going the extra mile to machine the "clamping" plate for the female side of the die. Are "cushioned" clamping plates used just for speedy loading and unloading? Seems the "clamping plate" could simply be bolted in place as suggested and keep the material in-place and in tension during the process just fine this way.
Hey Scooter, I don't know what we're making, but 20 minutes later here is the first stamping. Give me a few more minutes and I'll see if I can improve on the final results. It's crude I know, I just wanted to see for myself real quick what it takes.
Scoot, The cushion and draw bead are all to allow automation of the pressing process. If you do the 3 part tool I suggested you are not looking for automation. Badshifter: What is the material? Rex
Yeah! Check that out! And I suspect the wrinkling we see at the intersection of the "T" is probably just from not having the material clamped. Thanks for doing that! I think there's a lot to be learned from what you've done real quickly. Yep!!! Correct! Thanks again! I really have a good feel for how I might handle all this. You guys keep posting more and more cool stuff though! Keep it coming!! Great thread!!
Regardless of how you do your dies, you will have to experiment with material overage and trim to a finished piece, most likely. Most temporary dies of this sort I have seen have the male half on top. This also helps locate the blank more easily over the cavity.
OK, finished parts. There's the way it should be done, and the way it CAN be done. I'm into this about an hour. It's 20 gauge galvanized steel and one out of 20 gauge cold rolled. I welded the "T" male die to a 3/8 steel back, and added 1/8 inch steel around the "T" so it flattens the steel surrounding the die when it's fully compressed. Using a 20 ton hand press, it takes no effort at all. It bunches too much without cutting the basic shape into the blank, so I used the corner notcher to trim before stamping. No alignment pins or dowels, it self aligns as it goes together. I used welding anti-spatter spray for lube(it was close by) and then trimmed the final piece with my bandsaw. It was fun for me, added another possibility for future needs and build parts. I don't know Scooter, or what he is making but I hope this helps your project!
The die set I made to press the frenching panels that I sell for my Lincoln ****ons were done as a three piece set without a die carrier. The bottom is a piece of 1/2" A36 plate with the female socket machined into it. The middle piece is another piece of 1/2" A36 plate with a thru hole the size of the male die in it. The top piece is made of a section 1 3/4" OD 4140 pre-hard round bar, machined with pilot diameters and the working section. The metal gets spring clamped between the bottom and the middle piece, the male die is all that moves. I have less than $25 and about four hours of machine work in the entire die set. Parts it makes:
Thanks man! You are a ruler for doing some quick experimenting! It's stuff like this that helps educate everyone!! Great contribution to the thread!
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