MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY IN-DEPTH COVERAGE OF THE FASTENER MANUFACTURING PROCESS
Meeting the challenge for tooling and dies Here Alberto Gonzàlez Ortiz de Urbina, from Spanish-based TEMSA Group, looks at the challenges of being a tooling and dies manufacturer and how the company’s production and services have developed in order to deliver solutions to customers.
As a tooling and dies manufacturer, what are the main challenges you face and how do you overcome them?
“In order to be a successful tooling and dies company we believe it is necessary to diversify. This means not only diversifying the product range within one market, such as the fastener market, but diversifying markets and fields of application. This has been a long-term objective of ours and has proved successful. However, in the short-term it did create challenges regarding producing different products at the same time in production. To enable us to do this we had to master the manufacturing process of the different products for different markets. All whilst being profitable and understanding what each partner expects from us. We overcome these challenges by investing in machinery, as well as human and technical resources. There were no clear solutions in the market, so we developed them ourselves. This means none of our machinery is standard, it is instead modified by our technicians. This enables us to enhance the product range to focus on many different niches and be competitive in all of them. Recent challenges we have faced include the increase of quality certification over the last few years, as well as error shapes in very long tools. However, we have been able to provide a solution thanks to a massive investment in quality inspection equipment. We have four
3D machines and four contracers available to our workers so they can certify their own work. Now more than ever each radius and shape is measured and certified. We are working on carbide with extreme hardness by grinding, milling, turning and eroding. This demands cutting edge, robust CNC machines that make exactly what you tell them to do, and this demands equipment to verify it exactly. Alongside the machines, the difficulties of products get reduced if the drawing is good and we can see exactly what the customer wants. That is where our design team is able to help by double checking the drawings and verifying that everything is ok, as well as simplifying them if there are misunderstandings.”
How have the requirements for tooling, dies and punches developed over the years?
“The accuracy in materials and tolerances has increased significantly. For instance, regarding carbide, we previously just received a general name on drawings such as ‘carbide’ or ‘Widia’. Not anymore. We have done comprehensive work of pedagogy among the customers, so they improve their drawings by writing exactly what they want. This resulted in customers changing from just ‘carbide’ to the cobalt % using the G-Standard ‘G50, G20’ and from that to specify the grain size, such as ‘25%Co Fine grain’. Whilst the tolerances are smaller, the customers needed it and required it, so we invested in the machinery.
100 FASTENER + FIXING MAGAZINE ≡ ISSUE 124: JULY 2020
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