Mohamed Aboelfotouh
For a few hundred parts there are three ways to produce them: print the parts directly, print a short-life tool and mold or form the parts in it, or cut a conventional tool. Each route has a different mix of fixed cost and cost per part, so each one wins ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A worn parting edge, a cracked die casting insert or a late engineering change does not always need a new insert. Material can be added to the existing steel and machined back to size. The method used to add it decides how much heat enters the tool, and h ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A printed steel insert is not finished when the build ends. It comes out of the machine welded to a plate, rough, stressed and, in most cases, not yet at working hardness. The steel grade decides how easily it prints, and the steps after the build decide ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A steel injection mold takes weeks and an aluminum prototype mold takes one to two weeks. A printed polymer insert can be on the machine the day after the design is released. It will not last long and it will not hold tight tolerances, but it produces rea ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Cooling takes more than half of a typical injection molding cycle, and it decides warpage, sink and dimensional stability. Drilled cooling lines are straight, so in a curved or deep cavity their distance to the surface changes from point to point. Conform ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Additive manufacturing builds a part by adding material layer by layer instead of cutting it from a block. For a tool shop it is not a replacement for milling, EDM and grinding. It is a fourth capability that does three things the other machines cannot: i ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A mold or die that fails in the press stops production, damages itself further while it fails, and has to be repaired under time pressure. Most of those failures give warning: a vent filling up, a spring losing force, a punch edge rounding, a water channe ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A tooling quotation is a forecast of hours and purchases for a product that does not exist yet. Estimate too low and the job loses money; too high and it goes to a competitor. Buyers face the mirror image: without knowing how a price is built, they cannot ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Tool steel alone cannot always resist the wear, sticking and corrosion that molds and dies meet in service. A surface treatment adds a thin layer that is harder, slides better, or resists chemical attack. The common treatments differ greatly in hardness, ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Conventional roughing of tool steel uses a wide radial cut and a shallow depth. Only the bottom few millimetres of the cutter do the work, they do it under high load and heat, and the tool is worn out while most of its flute length is still new. Trochoida ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
A used cutting edge is a record of what happened in the cut. The position and shape of the wear show whether the speed was too high or too low, whether the grade was too hard or too soft, and whether heat or mechanical load did the damage. Machinists who ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Wire EDM cuts punches, die openings, inserts and stripper plates from hardened steel with a thin wire and no cutting force. The accuracy and surface it delivers depend mostly on one decision: how many passes are made. One rough cut is fast and adequate fo ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Twenty years ago, almost every hardened mold cavity was finished by sinker EDM. Today, stiff high-speed machines and coated carbide tools can mill steel at 50–60 HRC to final size and finish. Hard milling is usually faster and leaves a better surfac ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Every milling operation is defined by a small set of numbers: cutting speed, feed per tooth, and the width and depth of cut. Catalogues give recommended values, but the machine needs spindle speed and table feed, and the catalogue values assume a short, r ....
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Mohamed Aboelfotouh
Punches and die inserts fail in a small number of ways: they wear, chip, crack, pick up sheet material, or deform. Each failure points to a different property of the tool steel. The usual mistake is to answer every problem with a harder or more expensive ....
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