National Material Company is regarded as a global leader in servicing the needs of the steel industry and leading industrial and consumer product manufacturers. With over 50 years of expertise in metals processing and supply chain management, NMC offers metal stamping services as a part of a wide array of steel processing capabilities. Read on to learn more about metal stamping:
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Metal stamping is an incredibly versatile and efficient manufacturing process that takes flat metal sheets or coils and transforms them into precisely shaped and intricate parts. By utilizing force, pressure, and specialized tooling, components with diverse forms — including bends, curves, cutouts, and embossing, are possible. This process offers low costs and higher lead times — both for short and long production runs while keeping consistent quality, dimensional accuracy, and repeatability of the manufactured parts.
as mentioned above, a lot of that type of work is done by lasers, plasma, and waterjet these days.
One of the big issues is dies- a simple cutting die for a shape more complicated than a circle can easily cost a few grand. Old time punch press lines would use progessive tooling, where one die does interior holes, the next does some exterior trimming, and the last one cuts the part loose from the strip its being punched from. A die like that might take a good diemaker a month to get right, and be used for making ornamental stampings.
Whereas, a laser takes a very short time to make a cutting program for, and it doesnt require a forklift to load the program, or a pallet rack to store it on.
New punch presses are available, of course, but not used in anything like the quantity. For short run stuff, people often use cnc turret punches, which, like a cnc mill, will have a turret with lots of different tools ready to be rotated into place. If you want a rectangular grill with six screw holes, rectangular holes punched in it to make it grating, and an unpunched 2" edge, say, 12" x 16", dies for a punch press would be crazy expensive and take a long time to make. A Trumpf or Amada or Strippit turret punch can do ONE, with zero tooling costs, in a half hour.
Also, a lot of things that used to be made on a punch press arent needed anymore. Kevin Potter, who posts here, has been buying jewelry stamping dies from old line manufacturers in the NE that are either out of business, or heading there. He has been declining to buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of progessive stamping dies for purse handles, ornamental trim for lamps or furniture, decorative lighting parts, bobeches, leaves, and hundreds of other products that just dont sell anymore. There used to be hundreds of shops running presses, and most of the parts they made either are not made at all anymore, are made in china, or are now injection molded, powdered metal, or laser cut and brake bent. Plastics, Carbon fiber, cast aluminum, and laser cut sheet metal are all much bigger amounts of the unseen parts that used to be stamped.
Also, of course, they are dangerous, and require more experience to setup, tool, and run, than you would think. As long as somebody writes the program, it doesnt take much mechanical skill to turn on and load sheet on a laser cutter.
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