Page 35 - MetalForming-Jun-2018-issue

Automatic Spring Products and its 450 associates in three plants ship more than 700 million parts annually, with the vast percent- age sent to automotive customers, either OEMs or Tier Ones, for powertrain applications or as interior components for seats, consoles, and door and instrument panels.
Tool Wear at Top of Mind
Though work material runs the gamut, save for advanced high-strength steels, the majority of what Auto- matic Spring Products stamps is spring steel, some annealed and some hardened.
“Using high-carbon steels, we see excessive wear in our
tooling,” explains Rocky Nichols, the company’s tooling sys- tems manager.
Working such tough material in fact is a bear on tooling, and as everyone knows, the automotive supply chain is no place to make customers wait, so that tooling needs to last.
“The majority of what we stamp here is flat, with some limited forms,” says Nichols, “but to produce good parts in high volumes and meet tight deadlines, we not only must maintain dimensional tolerances, but also edge and surface quality on our tooling. We can’t afford to have punches that wear excessively.”
Excessive and premature tool wear shrinks punch diam- eters and diminishes surface and edge quality. Automatic Spring Products undertakes a number of measures to address tool wear and maintain strict delivery schedules. An inhouse toolroom boasting a roster of CNC machining equipment stays busy building and servicing dies, and the company is beginning to embark on a robust predictive/preventive- maintenance (PPM) program for all of its tooling. This includes implementing a ShopFloorConnect module that provides such capability. Also, the company is converting spreadsheets of meticulously kept tool-history records to database form in a transition from manual to automated PPM as a scheduling aid.
Company president/CEO and owner Steve Moreland is a metallurgist, and given the company’s long reliance on
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Fabrication: Tool