Page 34 - MetalForming March 2012

drives our tooling department to devel- op new ideas and new technologies. If you outsource your tooling, you don’t get that dedication to continuous improvement and creativity. We find this a key to staying globally competi- tive, particularly challenging in our core electronics market.”
As an example, toolroom manager Rich Wiess describes a die that the Wiegel toolroom built in 2008 for another stamper/customer. The 90- in.-long die comprises 18 stations and runs plated copper-alloy components for electrical circuit boards that go into automotive transmissions. When the customer began to struggle with qual- ity and on-time delivery, Wiegel took the die back, added some proprietary technology and saw immediate returns —uptime was increased by 35 to 40 per- cent, due to improvements such as changing the tool coating and engineer- ing new features to better contain slugs.
“Each month, we look at all of our active jobs and identify five sets of tools to focus on,” says Wiess. “We investigate all sorts of options to retro- fit new features to the tools, to increase their efficiency.”
“This is a key benefit to maintaining an inhouse state-of-the-art toolroom,” adds Aaron Wiegel, company vice pres- ident. “We can conduct research and development projects and realize huge gains in productivity. If a press goes down for die maintenance, we need our toolroom to get us back up and running in 24 hr. or less. In addition, some of the design enhancements we have made to our dies are truly unique —I’ve never seen some of these enhancements outside of our shop. So, we can keep that intellectual property inhouse, incorporate it into new tools— for us and for our key customers—and also retrofit the technology into exist- ing tools. Turnaround and technology are the keys.”
Hard Milling, Automated EDM
Wiess and his crew boast that “there’s nothing we can’t make here,” noting most importantly its invest- ments made a few years ago in hard
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