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Wire EDM steel and aluminum sandwiched together

RJT

Titanium
Joined
Aug 24, 2006
Location
greensboro,northcarolina
I have an order to make several hundred shims, 3 different styles. I will be stacking 50 each .001" stainless, .005 aluminium and .010 aluminium sheets, screwed together with a top and bottom 3/8 thick sacrificial aluminum plates. One pass nothing fussy, but I've never cut steel and aluminum at the same time. Am I asking for trouble?
 
RJT,

This shouldn't cause any issues, but be sure to have your stacks tight and secure! I have more concern about properly holding the sandwich stack than I do the different material types. Since you are machining very thin material, make sure your flush pressure isn’t too high, because too high a flush might cause the sheets to vibrate and delaminate. If the sheets do start to move on you, this can result in wire breaks or even a brass build-up on the parts (brass brazing) due to having an inconsistent electrical ground. Good luck!

- Brian
 
My gut says use a couple of 1/8" SS plates for the .001 SS shim, and do the AL shims with your Al strongbacks.

It's just a guess, but the very different conductivity and melting temperature of the two metals could make for problems when trying to cut them together.
 
Different materials should not be an issue at all, in fact almost all of my thin-stacked cuts are some form of stainless or exotic material, and my sacrificial plate is almost always AL.
If I can weld the stack together, I weld it, otherwise use a thicker bottom and top plates and screw or rivet together.
I prefer to stay between the 1 - 2 " total stack height, if needed I use the sacrificial plate as the thickness make-up.

Like Brian suggested, use lower flush pressure.
For the tech .... mehh.... just pick whatever you think is best.
In this case pick something for the stainless material, the AL will get cut just fine.
You will not get the optimum speed anyway, but it likely don't matter when the end result is a few hundred pieces/cut.

If your washers are small, I wish you Good Luck finding them in the tank!!!
 
We have done plenty of stacks screwed together, so I think we will be fine with keeping things secured, l know the potential problems well. My concern was only with the different material in the same stack.

Sent from my moto z3 using Tapatalk
 








 
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