Page 44 - MetalForming January 2020

Pressing for Perfection
Stamper achieves productivity gains with precision presses after assessing new or refurbished options.
When engineers at Weiss-Aug senrieder. “These state-of-the-art these machines are in production, the
Co., an East Hanover, NJ-
based stamper, began notic- ing in 2015 that stamping dies, running in their 30-plus-year-old stamping presses, were showing their age, they knew something had to be done. The question: What?
The company’s engineers knew that the root cause for the excessive die wear wasn’t tooling. Instead, they deter- mined that the old single-crank mechanical presses were responsible for excessive die wear.
With millions of parts produced weekly and with customers regularly demanding zero-PPM defects, Weiss- Aug management had to decide between refurbishing the existing machines or investing in new machinery at a premium cost of about 30 percent.
After a good bit of back-and-forth, Dieter Weissenrieder, owner and founder of Weiss-Aug, decided to bet big on nine new Bruderer BSTA 200 presses. The machines stamp rates to 2000 strokes/min., ideal for the high- volume, intricate stampings—think connectors for electronics—that Weiss- Aug provides its customers in the auto- motive, medical, interconnect, defense and aerospace industries.
“This is not a machine used to stamp boat anchors,” says Weis-
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machines are perfect for the sophisti- cated products that we produce, and the favored high-speed punch presses for our type of industry.”
Considering New vs. Refurbished
The decision between new and refurbished warranted careful consid- eration because many of the older machines, while they had accumulated 80,000-90,000 production hours, hummed along at high speeds, though not at the level of consistency required to meet quality standards.
Weiss-Aug chose new machinery over refurbished because making that jump enabled an increase in produc- tion output due to improved die life, while allowing the company to incor- porate technological advances offered by Bruderer.
“At the end of the day, these presses were old,” says Jeff Cole, vice president of operations, who Weissenrieder says lobbied the hardest for the new presses. “We were seeing premature tooling wear, and inconsistency in part geom- etry. We realized that it was time to change. It did not make economic sense to rebuild the nine 22-ton machines. Bruderer had incorporated significant technological advances in these new machines, and now that
improvements in output and part con- sistency are astonishing.”
Alois J. Rupp, president of Bruderer Machinery Inc., says that even though accuracy can be maintained on rebuilt presses, the older machines can’t accommodate the new features that set newer technology apart. For that reason and others, the reconditioned machines did not make sense for Weiss-Aug.
“In some cases, rebuilding machines for certain products makes sense; this wasn’t one of those cases,” Rupp says, explaining that Weiss-Aug’s stamped parts are small and complex, and rarely flat. Coined, formed and bent multiple times, tolerances are as tight as ±0.0005 in. while part quantities number in the millions. Materials used include stain- less steel, beryllium copper, beryllium, phosphor bronze, nickel and other alloys.
“When we began running the same dies, making the same parts in the new presses, we couldn’t believe the improved consistency within produc- tion runs,” Cole states. “Not only were we able to increase press speeds, but most of all the new machines reduced die maintenance. Dies also had to be adjusted less frequently, reducing downtime. In summary, productivity rose significantly.”