Page 39 - MetalForming February 2012

Beginning in 2006, Darling and his engineering team focused on rebuilding the technology literacy within its walls, becoming devoted to controlling the die design and build
process from start
to finish. By Janu-
ary 2007 it was
ready to launch its
newly developed
process, which begins
inhouse with develop-
ment and simulation. Die
faces are delivered to a select
group of die-design firms charged with creating designs ready to go directly to NC program- ming.
“For example,” says Darling, “con- sider a side-aperture design. If you look at the NC programming file, we’re opening up the same die design in the same software that the designer was working from. You’re calling up that detailed part of the assembly and lit- erally opening up the NC tool pathing work bench. This means we’re machin- ing right to the die design.”
Darling believes that while design itself might only represent 5 to 10 per- cent of the total cost of a die, it can impact 60 percent of that overall cost. And while he admits that “we’ll never be as inexpensive as a low-cost country,” results of the firm’s extraordinary lean efforts are impressive to say the least:
• Labor hours for die construction reduced by 35 percent;
• High success rate with dies being buyoff-ready at first sample; and
• A 50-percent reduction in engi- neering-rework time, which, says Dar- ling, “has taken a staggering number of hours out of our process when you’re talking about a shop that averages 500,000 labor hours per year.”
A Healthy Die-Design Standards Manual
Key to making its vision of creating manufacturable solids a reality has been nurturing a supply base of a handful (five or six) design houses com- mitted to working to the Autodie stan- dard and developing the required skills.
“We’re zealots in terms of die develop- ment and simulation,” says Autodie COO David Darling. “We are absolutely committed to providing our die-manufacturing group with 100-percent NC-ready die designs,” as evidenced by this fully surfaced Class A development.
“We’re very surfacing-intensive right now,” says Darling, “and very particular about the surfaces of each die design so that they can go directly to the mill. That level of skill and commitment is not easy to come by, and within the design software that we use inhouse, we use some very advanced techniques that not all design houses understand. These need to be developed.”
In the beginning of the Autodie transformation, its die-design stan- dards manual comprised just a few pages. Today it’s swelled with content to include more than 165 pages of instruc- tions and examples to teach the design community a new way of doing things, to enable machinable solids and avoid any remachining due to collisions and interferences.
“Before we were able to really hone this concept of creating manufac- turable solids,” says Darling, “we would spend four to six weeks of CAD/CAM programming to prepare die-design surfaces for machining. That time-con- suming and ‘un-lean’ process has been virtually eliminated as we’ve added content to the designs.”
Asked to provide examples of this “added content,” Darling points to Autodie’s proprietary application of exercises such as trim-post expansion, press compensation and radius reduc- tion. “Not only have we eliminated that additional four to six weeks of
surfacing we used to perform in order to prepare a die design for NC pro- gramming, but we also made time to perform these extra exercises,” he says.
Darling also notes that Autodie designs now are “laced with features and identifiers that help automate 3D programming in Catia. Learn- ing to do design in this way can streamline the process required to develop a line of dies that once might have required 200 hr. of NC program-
ming down to just 30 hr.”
Much of the lean programming at
Autodie comes by virtue of the firm’s relationship with Fiat/Chrysler. “This has allowed us access to tool benches inside of our CAD that most companies would never know even existed or that would be cost prohibitive,” says Dar- ling. “In addition, the programming is all associative, so that should a die design change—during tryout, for example—you’re not breaking all of the links and having to start over. Cut- ter paths are permanently linked to the surfaces they’re cutting, so if the surfaces change so do the cutter paths.”
More Lean, to Focus
on the Long-Term Vision
Other lean die-development efforts shine at Autodie. For example, Darling describes the firm’s use of starter blocks that contain features and identifiers to provide designers a good starting point and help ensure that they will develop dies that meet internal standards.
“For example,” Darling says, “when a designer begins to develop a new die, he accesses pull-down menus in the software that we’ve customized to pre- vent use of blocks not typically stocked by our steel suppliers. And then within these starter blocks, we limit the selec- tion of screws and dowels to what we have decided to stock. This prevents a designer from specifying some ran- dom counterbore depth in the block and then wastefully calling out a matching screw that only adds to our inventory requirements. Instead, the designer specifies screws and dowels that we’ve predetermined to keep in stock.”
Tooling Technology
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MetalForming/February 2012 37