Dan Davis wrote:
Jurgen,
Thanks for the info. A few clarifications:
LOM can make it for hydroforming, but only for simple geometry (bending rather than drawing) and limited pressure, i.e. 150 bar.
With your 3mm steel drawn 50mm, you easily top 100 bar on a hydroforming press.
I assume you mean 1000 bars? Actually I'm more interested in LOM/hydroforming for sheet metal (e.g., auto body panels) than this application, but since I was asking.......
This is true - 1000 bar. It was a typo.
But why cast metal ?
Build you pulley with SLA, then use a special drawing die resin from Ciba, a low-temperature alloy by MCP or even a Concrete from Densit AS, Denmark.
But, to be honest, I am not sure about tool wear in YOUR 3 mm steel - case.
Tool wear is important, as the thought is that since we are sure of the design :^), this prototype tool could also be used as a production tool (50K or so yearly) or at the very least a bridge tool.
I think you should try a resin tool first, but maybe not on a time critical project.
The mentioned company (HAGO) could try this for you, or somebody else (I have more adresses).
So, I feel that you could end up high speed milling a tool.
True, high speed CNC are rare here, mostly things are shipped to Japan and we are definately trying to avoid that. We have acquired some CNC machines, but they are just being set up, so I still think of RP first. You know, "when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
Good point !
Juergen
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:44:56 EEST