Looking back at 15 years in the die and mould industry

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Industrial integration at many levels

Since cutting remains a leading subtractive technology for die and mould shops, those who supply the industry have been increasingly combining forces. It’s not uncommon to visit a machine tool builder’s showroom or trade fair booth and notice that the company is demonstrating its equipment with cutting tools from a specific firm. In fact, that supplier may have worked with the machine tool company to develop a complete solution.

Israeli cutting tool and workholding solution manufacturer Iscar said it has noticed rising demand for close partnerships with machine tool suppliers. Igal Kagan, manager for machine tool builders and turnkey projects at Iscar, said the requirements for cutting tool and toolholder producers to work with the machine tool side have risen sharply over the past two years and are being driven by vocal calls for such relationships from German firms.

He said the company delivers cutting tools and workholding units as complete assemblies to machine tool manufacturers, who want to reduce labour-intensive operations.

Rising demand for turnkey systems has been coming from countries such as Russia and China, which have capital but not the skilled labour to operate high-tech machinery. “They just want to be able to push a button.” As per cutting tool technology, the company explained that around the turn of this century, carbide heads with sharp cutting edges became a preferred solution for machining complex shapes. One of Iscar’s products offered integral threads for quick indexing on reusable tool bodies. In addition, butterfly-shaped milling inserts were introduced for more efficiency using tangentially clamped inserts.

Automation: a requirement, a choice, or both?

The idea of a machine that one can fire up and forget has also seeped into Europe. Since the turn of this century, the interest of young people in manufacturing has declined, a shift that may be due to falling employment in the sector. Regardless of the reason, the lack of skilled labour for mechanical engineering tasks has helped push automation, according to Makino. “The tool-making industry has responded by investing in automated production processes that reduce the demand for skilled machine operators. However, such automated processes can only function efficiently with minimal product spoilage if the toolmaking machine runs with a maximum degree of stability.”

While a range of materials are now being used in die and mould making, steel remains the go-to metal. However, this steadfast foundation has undergone its own changes, according to supplier Industeel. It noted that until the late 90s, the vast majority of moulds had been traditionally made of conventional steel grades, such as W1.2311 / 2738, AISI P20 or W1. 2316 / 2085.

Then companies began producing steel specifically for the industry. Industeel, for example, launched Superplast, which is said to be very different than conventional steel grades. With similar mechanical properties to standard grades, it offered improved processing ability such as machinability, polishability or etchability (texturing). “In fact, while conventional grades designed for general applications were used for injection moulds simply due to the lack of anything better, Superplast grades were designed with the intention of satisfying the specific needs of the whole plastic industry.”

Such steel grades are designed with specific chemical analysis. The lower concentration of carbon added to micro-alloys improves the uniformity of the steel, the company explained.

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