Page 26 - MetalForming July 2014

The War-Room Strategy for
Stamping
Stamping
Aluminum
Aluminum
Aluminum will attack your tooling, frustrate your
part and die designers, and challenge press operators and maintenance personnel. Here, industry experts Pete Ulintz and Stuart Keeler detail the challenges, and lay out a game plan for fighting back.
BY PETE ULINTZ AND STUART KEELER
Lightweighting, a frequently dis- mass is by using lightweight stamp- binations to tailor an alloy to a specif-
ic set of properties.
The massive number of available
alloys allows an engineer to select the specific aluminum alloy needed to meet stamping requirements. Howev- er, most times an expert in aluminum is required to sort out the advantages and disadvantages of each possible coil and explain this to the user. This requires a partnership between sup- plier and buyer, and discussions about the specific properties of each coil—not generalities such as good stretchabili- ty or high strength.
Aluminum Properties
To obtain the formability proper- ties of aluminum alloys, as with other
cussed concept throughout the
automotive industry, describes product-design activities that maxi- mize fuel efficiency to meet federal corporate average fuel-economy (CAFÉ) requirements by reducing vehi- cle mass. One way automakers reduce
Stuart Keeler and Pete Ulintz author monthly columns in MetalForming magazine and conduct seminars for the Precision Metalforming Association. Ulintz is advanced product engineering manager for Anchor Mfg. Group, Cleve- land, OH; pete.ulintz@toolingbyde- sign.com. Keeler is president of Keeler Technologies LLC, in Grosse Ile, MI; keel- tech@comcast.net.
ings produced from aluminum alloys. The aluminum alloys available to engineers can be divided into two main groups; non-heattreatable alloys and
heattreatable alloys (Fig. 1).
The first level of identification clas-
sifies the type of alloy (e.g., 5XXX series). The second level defines possible com- position changes made within each alloy: 5005, 5154, 5636, and other com- binations within the 5XXX series.
The third level defines the tempers that can be applied to a specific alloy/ composition: 5145: O, H34, H38, and H112. These tempers define finishing conditions used to stabilize the microstructure, increase strain hard- ening, prevent aging, and other com-
24 MetalForming/July 2014
www.metalformingmagazine.com