flanging a flat disk without notching the edge

Hi all,

We need to be able to put a flange of about 3/8" or 9mm or so, onto a flat disc of 22ga 304 stainless. It can be a multi-step process, but we'd really like to be able to change diameters easily, and avoid pounding it out with a hammer, and avoid stamping tooling at least for now.

We've seen various machines that require a notch (that won't work for us), or put flanges on tubes but not on discs, etc.

Do any of you know of particular roller machines, dies, sets of dies, etc. that would do this task? Is it called by some special name I don't know?

[Machines that make end-caps for pressure tanks do a very similar thing, but all of them seem to be made for much heavier material.]

thx
bmw

I'm not a sheet metal man but I think what you are looking for is a bead roller with a set of "tipping " dies.

And 404 is going to be a work-hardening SOB to work with. Have you got the ability to anneal the work?

What is the finished OD of the blank?

Finished OD will be right at 10". So the change in OD from the blank to the finished part is 10.75" to 10" (or very close to that.)

bryan_machine said:

Finished OD will be right at 10". So the change in OD from the blank to the finished part is 10.75" to 10" (or very close to that.)

Click to expand...

Do you have a quantity to do?

How about spinning it, if the bead rolling with tipping dies bombs?

Good luck, that's a horrible material to learn how to flange things with.

Tooling does not need to be ground and polished heat treated steel for low qtys. You can get a lot of pressings out of simple mild steel tooling. I put a 3/16" flange on some 1mm thick plate in a complicated shape for a customer. Same tools just about to do its thousandth part in the next batch if i have been counting right. Its not worn out either. Laser cut blanks and the finished flange is accurate to height under 1/32 all around on every part. Did take a few goes to get the blank just right, but its easy ish to do. You don't want more material than you need, it just adds to wrinkling. Its the tight radius corners that always give me the largest problems. Both to get it to draw smooth and get the blank just right.

I would be making a tool out of some laser cut plates, only allow a little bit of clearance for the material between the punch and die. You need enough press to be able to bottom and smooth out any wrinkles formed. Top lip of the die needs about a 1/8" radius IMHO, and that benefits greatly in a quick crude polish, think smooth more than polished. The press needs to be self guiding enough to keep the punch and die parallel. The punch and die so long as kept nearly aligned will centre them selves up in use.

Other option is spinning as above. If you can find someone local, all they need is some simple discs of the size you need, which can cheaply be made - laser cut etc.

We did a similar job by the hundreds at a former employer.

Spinning, with a roller tool ( = big ball bearing on a stick in the toolpost)

Titanium discs, knocked over 90 degrees, with a roughly 10 mm flange.

Did it by CNC, but that just shows that the job was simple enough that you could just tell the machine to do it, with confidence in repeatability. It also suggests that you could do this on manual machinery with just a little bit of chin-scratching to get set up.

It further suggests that size could be adjusted / tuned as per your OP.

Or, as adama suggested, this isn't a difficult part to press with a relatively simple setup.

.

Thanks all - we're definitely going to build stamping dies which will likely get used in an h-frame press.

The "spinning" approach would be good if we had a lathe...
I'll remember that trick...