Custom Tooling

CUSTOM TOOLING is our specialty. We have planers up to 30 ft in length and grinders up to 16 ft in length, and we mold all kinds of custom urethane tooling in the same location. We are the only company in the world that can produce both Steel and Urethane tooling at the same location. In applications requiring a combination steel & Urethane tooling, we can design and manufacture the tooling better than anybody in the world. We have more than 33 years experience in this field.

We differentiate ourselves by being an Engineering oriented company. We have 3 Mechanical Engineers working in key positions, including the Company owner.

The Engineer in this photo is Carl Michelsen, who has over 30 years experience in sheet metal fabricating areas such as hydro-forming, Aircraft part manufacturing, perforating, custom stainless steel fabricating… etc.

This 400 ton Hydraulic Press Brake is used for our development and try-out. With any custom tooling that we build, we ask the customer to send us same sample materials that they will be using the tooling for, and we form the parts with the dies that we build and send samples along with the tooling.

Shown in this photo is a custom designed radius forming Punch and a Urethane bottom Die
(SMART PAD-which is our standard product). This 10' long die set was designed to allow for spring-back in a perforated lighting fixture reflector. This customer has 3 sets of this tooling and has been using this tooling for several years in 2 plants. He claims… “using any other tooling is stupid”.

 


Corrugated Panel Bending Die

  
 
   
The project is to build a tooling system to bend a 16 Ga. galvanized steel radius corrugated sheet into a 90 degree bend across the corrugation. While bending a corrugated sheet, the peaks of the corrugated sheet will be in tension, while the valleys will be in compression and will be collapsing the material. So, to make a neat bend, pockets for gathering the excess material has to be provided. Doing this in a hard tool is virtually impossible. So, by machining a protrusion in the valley areas of the punch and by using Urethane for the bottom die, we were able to bend the excess metal around these protrusions to make a neat looking bend.
 
      
The punch is machined on a CNC Machining Center, with the radius of the peaks exactly matching the size and shape of the convex shapes. In the valley portion of the punch, a projection is machined in each valley, to provide enough area for the sheet metal to gather the excess material. The Urethane bottom Die is molded with the same corrugated sheet as the sheet metal being bent. This is molded in a welded steel box, strong enough to contain the Urethane , and re-direct the forming forces up-wards, to force the sheet metal tightly against the machined punch, stretching the sheet metal around the convex parts of the punch and collapsing the sheet metal uniformly in the concave parts of the punch. With the urethane in the bottom, there is no marking on the sheet metal.
 
Another success story of a unique tooling system designed and built by us.  
 
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