Ceilidh ... Exciting New Project/same old crap

Hydraulic Die Forming Discussion Group

Exciting New Project/same old crap

Well to me , anyway. More big, ugly copper parts need cut&form dies made. Fast , too !!. No time to wait around for the contract heat treater to get around to it. These 3 dies are just barely small enough
(8" by 10" plates, modified to squeeze through) for the power aided saw, but too large for my kiln. Gotta think of something..... ok, build a new kiln door with 2" extra space inside!!!!. Great, except for the kiln cement that doesn't, so I use 1/8" steel dowel pins (and requisite sheetmetal casing) to hold the soft bricks together. Then , it's whip out some cheesy
face-forming models in sculpey and rush them over to the sandcasting area for silver/bronze alloy pour. I'm getting better, because they actually filled all the way up .

The nasty part about these (over and above the pain and torture of sawing a HARD batch of 3/32" tool steel) is that I must make them form using cold rolled copper, instead of annealled. Basically, I just made the contours smoother and more gradual , to minimize sharp bends and hopefully prevent tearing. These forms are about 4" by 3" and are about 1/4" deep with puffy cheeks, stick-up noses , and
recessed eye sockets (for 1/2" marbles as eyes) dug into built up bumps.

Oh, I should build solid epoxy molds like I did for the leaf and dragonfly (I SHOULD just buy a bigger kiln too... lots of things I 'should' do, but if I listened to that particular voice in me 'ead, I would've gone to school and gotten a job and we wouldn't be working on these dies, would we?), but the customer is too cheap. So, I'm left with multi-step forming (I do a lot of these eye sockets as a second operation , with a 2 part setup in the arbor press) which they are again too cheap for, or try for the all-in-one cut&form die to use with urethane only.Which is what I end up doing.

This really is a powerful breed of beast, deep embossing/shallow drawing
in conjunction with large blanking die. There's the solid-mold , 2 part die setup, which is a world of trouble to make, and this simpler way. The simpler way asks a lot more of the cutting die and the urethane .
The solid molds aid greatly in forming the metal , and offer better support to the cutting die. These particular designs are simple , and so I can get away with pressing them into just urethane. They will actually cut that way, and have no projections that would be vulnerable to flexing, which (as we all know) can lead to die breakage
and keep the die from fully cutting.

OK bye,
Dar

[ This message was edited on Sun Jul 7 by the author ]

Sun Jul 7