HI guys,
OK, here's another weird one.
We make hand saws. Fancy hand saws. The spines look like trusses. They're laser cut in 6061-T6, .190 thick, so there's lots of little slugs to knock out of the holes. They're single-tabbed, so they stay in the blank during cutting. If we cut them clear, one or two of them will only partially drop, then tilt and stick up proud of the sheet. Then the laser will home onto those spikes like we were aiming for them, and knock its lens out of alignment. (at best) So they're tabbed, and going to stay that way.
The problem is that we're blowing a lot of handwork time (A) knocking the tabs out, and (B) cleaning up the little pip that's left over from the tab on the inside of all the windows. (There are 15-18 windows per saw, and we punch out many hundred of these things every month. So *lots* of windows to clean up.)
So my problems are two: knockout and pip cleanup.
The obvious answer for knocking out the slugs is just to make a sort of pannini-press sort of die, with a bunch of steel dowel pins to punch the slugs out through a custom cut steel baseplate that matches the shapes of the windows, plus 0.020".
Other than the PITA factor of making it, not such a big deal, except perhaps figuring out which press to run it in. I have a bunch of kick presses, so that may be the way. Use ball bearing guide shafts, and let the jig align on itself, with the press just supplying power.
The kinky part comes when I had a thought to combine the knockout die with some sort of a cleanup function for all the pips.
The pips are always in the same place. So my idea was to do something like a broach to file or shave off the pip as the die was closing to knock out the slugs. The thing I'm picturing is like a gear or pulley keyway broach but shorter. All it really needs to do is shave off that little teeny pip, 0.200" tall. So it doesn't need to be much. In a perfect world, it'd be round, with a flat spot for the broach face, and a stock item for somebody, doing something else, so i could just order a bunch of them off the shelf somewhere. I'd like a pointed tip so I could aim them into a drill jig bushing for support on the bottom side.
Have any of you out there seen small short broaches like this? Who uses them? For what?
I have a die filer, but I really don't want to do them that way if I can avoid it. Waaaaaay too much repetitive work for me to ask any of my guys to go nuts doing it that way if I can help it.
Anybody got a better idea?
As a final wrinkle, we do spend a fair bit of time cleaning up the inside of the windows with dremels, to smooth out the cut marks. (Because the customers require it.) So I'm also pondering what it'd take to just make up a die that had broaches that'd fully broach all the windows by a few thou, just to clean up the cut walls. I'm assuming for something like that, I'd be wanting to talk to a broach house?
Anybody ever done anything like this? Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks,
Brian
OK, here's another weird one.
We make hand saws. Fancy hand saws. The spines look like trusses. They're laser cut in 6061-T6, .190 thick, so there's lots of little slugs to knock out of the holes. They're single-tabbed, so they stay in the blank during cutting. If we cut them clear, one or two of them will only partially drop, then tilt and stick up proud of the sheet. Then the laser will home onto those spikes like we were aiming for them, and knock its lens out of alignment. (at best) So they're tabbed, and going to stay that way.
The problem is that we're blowing a lot of handwork time (A) knocking the tabs out, and (B) cleaning up the little pip that's left over from the tab on the inside of all the windows. (There are 15-18 windows per saw, and we punch out many hundred of these things every month. So *lots* of windows to clean up.)
So my problems are two: knockout and pip cleanup.
The obvious answer for knocking out the slugs is just to make a sort of pannini-press sort of die, with a bunch of steel dowel pins to punch the slugs out through a custom cut steel baseplate that matches the shapes of the windows, plus 0.020".
Other than the PITA factor of making it, not such a big deal, except perhaps figuring out which press to run it in. I have a bunch of kick presses, so that may be the way. Use ball bearing guide shafts, and let the jig align on itself, with the press just supplying power.
The kinky part comes when I had a thought to combine the knockout die with some sort of a cleanup function for all the pips.
The pips are always in the same place. So my idea was to do something like a broach to file or shave off the pip as the die was closing to knock out the slugs. The thing I'm picturing is like a gear or pulley keyway broach but shorter. All it really needs to do is shave off that little teeny pip, 0.200" tall. So it doesn't need to be much. In a perfect world, it'd be round, with a flat spot for the broach face, and a stock item for somebody, doing something else, so i could just order a bunch of them off the shelf somewhere. I'd like a pointed tip so I could aim them into a drill jig bushing for support on the bottom side.
Have any of you out there seen small short broaches like this? Who uses them? For what?
I have a die filer, but I really don't want to do them that way if I can avoid it. Waaaaaay too much repetitive work for me to ask any of my guys to go nuts doing it that way if I can help it.
Anybody got a better idea?
As a final wrinkle, we do spend a fair bit of time cleaning up the inside of the windows with dremels, to smooth out the cut marks. (Because the customers require it.) So I'm also pondering what it'd take to just make up a die that had broaches that'd fully broach all the windows by a few thou, just to clean up the cut walls. I'm assuming for something like that, I'd be wanting to talk to a broach house?
Anybody ever done anything like this? Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks,
Brian