The manufacturing cycle of metal stamping products is long, involves many processes, and is prone to various abnormal situations (including rework, scrap, splitting, replenishment, replacement, buffer materials, etc.) with significant investment. The production process requires tracking and cost analysis. Additionally, during production, customers may insert orders at any time based on market changes, which is unpredictable for hardware enterprises. Relying on manual management certainly cannot meet the changing requirements of customer orders. Only after an order is confirmed can it be incorporated into management. Sometimes, order status changes are not responded to in a timely manner, often leading to last-minute rushes. This indicates that how to initiate information construction has become the primary issue facing decision-makers in hardware enterprises.
As a highly discrete industry, metal stamping parts manufacturers frequently encounter bottlenecks under traditional manual management in daily production. Firstly, market competition is fierce, and user demands are constantly changing. Many hardware enterprises primarily focus on small-batch and medium-batch production, with product design and manufacturing processes often varying according to customer requirements. Therefore, hardware enterprises need to develop sound production plans to enhance production flexibility and adapt to the market. The author believes that generally, hardware enterprises produce products based on orders (contracts), with complex product structures, numerous parts, and both outsourced and self-manufactured components. During the production process, relying on traditional manual management to reasonably optimize production results in a heavy workload for production management. Information data from various departments cannot be standardized or shared across interfaces, making it impossible to scientifically control delivery times and affecting order execution rates.
Secondly, metal stamping parts manufacturers have many outsourced factories. With traditional manual management methods, how to track and control the product quality, price, and reputation of stamping factories, how the procurement department controls the quantity of incoming materials to ensure error-free production without causing inventory backlog, and how to ensure a reasonable level of capital occupation are headaches for hardware enterprises.
In many cases, the number of operations for bending parts mainly depends on the complexity of their structural shape, which is determined by the number of bend angles. If the bending radius of a bent part is smaller than the allowable value, an additional forming operation is required. Similarly, the number of operations for drawn parts is influenced by material properties, drawing height, number of drawing steps, drawing diameter, material thickness, and other conditions, which need to be determined through drawing process calculations. If the corner radius of a drawn part is small or there are certain requirements for dimensional accuracy, another forming operation needs to be added after drawing. Based on this model, determining the number of operations for stamping parts should also meet the conditions of the enterprise's existing die capacity and stamping equipment. Forming capability should ensure die processing and correspondingly improve assembly precision requirements; otherwise, the number of operations must be increased. For simple blanking parts, a single-operation stamping die is used; conversely, due to die structure or strength limitations, the internal and external contours of complex stamping dies should be divided into multiple sections, requiring multiple stamping processes.
Recently, many customers, after receiving quotations for metal stamping products, have suggested making simple stamping dies to produce samples for testing. For these customers, we recommend that they do not make simple dies from the start, especially for the following reasons:
1. Simple dies cannot produce stamping parts that basically meet the drawing requirements.
Customers want to use simple dies to make samples, but the product has not yet been confirmed in the early stages, and they hope to spend less on die costs to test samples. However, products made with simple dies cannot guarantee dimensional accuracy, and customers may not be able to determine the dimensional non-conformance caused by the product.
2. Simple dies cannot ensure the uniformity of stamped parts.
Simple dies cannot guarantee that every stamping is identical because they often lack accessories such as positioning and guide pins, and each stroke may have different offsets, leading to unsatisfactory results when customers inspect the stamped parts.
3. Simple dies cannot be used for mass production, and making them would result in waste.
Due to their simple structure and low precision, simple stamping dies can only be used for mass production after the customer has confirmed the samples. This can result in significant waste.
In fact, if the customer does not confirm the stamped parts later in the process, there is basically no need to use simple stamping dies for sample trials. Other processing methods can be considered instead. Most steels are stamped products, and punching can be used to create stiffening ribs, beads, embossing, or flanging to increase rigidity.
The above is related content about hardware stamping processing. In short, processing products through stamping has become an important means and development direction of modern industrial production. However, the disadvantages of stamping parts are high mold requirements, complex manufacturing, long lead times, and high manufacturing costs, which limit small-batch production. Therefore, most stamping parts are produced on a large scale, which also reflects the importance of molds. I hope this helps the reader. Characteristics of hardware stamping processing and sample handling with simple stamping dies.