CNC Machined Parts for Automotive Equipment

Our automotive work is tooling and equipment rather than vehicle parts: stamping die inserts and blade sets, forming and V-groove die blocks, ganged insert bars with a row of identical positions, and the hubs, shafts and fixtures that go into production and test equipment. The parts are mostly tool steel and carbon steel, and most of them are hardened.

The process order on hardened tooling is the thing to get right. A die insert cut to profile and then hardened carries the distortion of heat treatment inside its finished feature. The route we use is rough mill soft, heat treat, then wire cut the profile last, so the final operation removes the distortion instead of preserving it. Tell us the target hardness and who is doing the heat treatment, because both change the route.

On ganged tooling the number that matters is the accumulated pitch across the whole row, not the pitch between two neighbours. A small error repeated seventeen times is what misfeeds a strip in the press, so the set is checked as a set, on the vision measuring system, before it is released.

Send the die drawing with the material condition and the hardness. If the part is a replacement for tooling already in the press, send the last inspection report you accepted as well; it tells us where the previous supplier actually landed inside the tolerance band.