How the Metal Stamping Industry Has Evolved

04 Nov.,2024

 

How the Metal Stamping Industry Has Evolved

Metal stamping is a manufacturing process used widely in the United States and throughout the world because it can efficiently produce thousands of identical parts, made to exacting specifications and often to extremely tight tolerances. Manufacturing using metal stamping has been in use in the United States for nearly 130 years and today, the metal stamping industry is well-developed and widely used in the production of many high-quality products.

Check now

The History of Metal Stamping

  • &#;s. Stamped parts were used in the production of bicycles in Germany and imported into the United States. Thereafter, U.S. companies began having stamping machines custom-built, creating the first metal manufacturers.
  • &#;s. The industrial revolution started to spread its influence across the United States and with that came the realization that faster and cheaper parts could be made using metal stamping. Consequently, American metal manufacturers flourished.
  • &#;s. An innovator in the assembly line production process, Henry Ford, was finally convinced to adopt metal stamping in the production of Ford automobile parts. Production demands confirmed the wisdom of this efficient and quality-focused production method.
  • &#;s. American manufacturing production continued its rapid growth, including the development of new industries. The metal stamping industry grew as well, adding different post-production stamping materials, including plating and finishing.
  • &#;s. The post World War II economic boom caused a significant expansion in most industries and metal stamping surged accordingly.
  • Metal fabrication is an essential part of many industries and metal stamping is a key component of metal fabrication. In the United States, metal stamping is currently a $42 billion dollar industry, and the global market for metal stamping is projected to reach nearly $300 billion dollars by .

Various Industries Rely on Metal Stamping

The metal stamping industry has superb applications for the following industries:

  • Automotive, where vehicles are becoming faster, sturdier and filled with the latest technology. Key components include airbags, structural elements, brakes, body parts, sensors, and fuel injectors.
  • Medical, involving highly precise medical tools.
  • Aerospace, where there is clearly no room for errors in flight. Components include precise gauges, various equipment and metal fabricated parts of many types.
  • Defense, involving everything from ammunition, precision equipment, transportation, minute assemblies and instrumentation.
  • Consumer electronics, with products of many types.
  • Electrical and other electronics products.
  • The growing solar industry.
  • Agriculture, involving parts for equipment and automated processing.

Trends Influencing Continued Growth of the Metal Stamping Industry

The increasing use of metal stamping is driving innovation across industries, along with both competition and collaboration, resulting in better, stronger and more useful products.

Trends include:

  1. Responding to the manufacturing return to the United States from offshore production (called &#;reshoring.&#;) Precision metal stamping will be well-placed to address increased manufacturing needs.
  2. Rising production attributed to solar paneling. Metal stamping is well-positioned to service this growing industry.
  3. Integrating increased automation into production. This facilitates higher production rates at lower unit costs. Advanced production equipment offers outstanding precision and speed for optimizing production.
  4. The continued drive for durability and quality is served well by the metal stamping industry.

Seek Proven Expertise for Your Quality Metal Stamping Needs

Contact Velocity Metalworks, serving the greater St. Louis area and the Midwest. We have been recognized as a valuable partner in the metal stamping industry for our strong tool design and build competency. With our metal stamping capacity, precision machining services and EDM capability, we provide the superior experience, precision, and quality you can depend on.

share

Progressive Stamping Dies - A Brief History

Prior to the discovery of metal, people used simple hand tools crafted from bone, rock and wood. After fire was discovered, humans soon learned that adding heat to certain rocks (ores) would free the metal from the rock. Eventually, the art of extracting and smelting metals and forming them into usable objects evolved. This practice is commonly referred to as metalworking.

Metalworkers were considered very valuable members of early societies. As more and more items and tools began to be made out of metals, more people were needed who were skilled in the craft of metalworking. Objects made out of metals were necessary for industry, farming, jewelry making and defense purposes. 

Old coins show that the art of die sinking - a process to create a specific size or shape cavity or opening for casting or forging - was known to the ancient Greeks at least back to 800 B.C. (ref: J.L Lewis, Journal of Commerce, ). But these artifacts do not show that the use of punches and dies was equally well known. 

Eventually coins were made using two (2) dies - a lower die depicting the coin in a negative form, and a similar upper die. The coin blank was placed between the two die halves and then the upper die was struck with a heavy hammer rendering a positive image on the blank. Even today people occasionally speak of coins being &#;struck.&#; 

The first record of punches and dies used in a machine having guides (or ways) to ensure punch-to-die alignment, is the fifteenth century, when a German locksmith used them to manufacture hinges. In a patent was granted to a Mr. DeVere of France for &#;Dies for Punching and Drawing Sheet Metal,&#; perhaps the first of its kind. 

greatlionparts Product Page

A significant advancement in metal stamping operations was the emergence of the progressive stamping die. The earliest published record describing a &#;progressive die&#; that I could find is in J.L. Lewis&#; book, Dies and Die Making. Oberlin Smith&#;s treatise, The Press Working of Metals&#; (Wiley and Sons, ) provides a good likeness of the first die maker that we may ever find but it makes no mention of a progressive die. It does, however, mention &#;follow-on&#; tooling and &#;successive gang cutting,&#; which are described in a manner that suggests they could be early predecessors to the progressive die. 

Progressive die use in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century appears to be limited; primarily to large companies producing products in very high quantity, such as electric motor components. The first edition of Die Design Handbook (American Society of Tool and Manufacturing, ) contains an entire chapter on progressive dies with numerous examples and illustrations of progressive die designs and die strips for electrical and electric motor components. 

Following World War II, the U.S. economy grew rapidly. Most contract metal stampers of the time produced metal stamping in single operation dies and presses. Material came to the press in strips and was hand fed into a blanking die. The blanks ended up in containers which were later brought to the next die operation. The parts were then hand loaded into subsequent forming and cutting operations and then hand unloaded into another container. 

As production demand increased, production speed became more important. Operator safety became a problem because operators were often injured while putting their hands into the die when loading and unloading parts. By the s, single operations in single presses made it difficult to keep up with rising production demands.

In , an design engineer named Ed Stouten, along with a partner, started a die design business in Grand Rapids, Michigan called, Capitol Engineering Company. Stouten looked for ways to overcome some of the problems contract manufacturers were having with single hit dies (safety, inefficiency, low productivity) and began to promote the idea of leaving some scrap material between parts to carry them through a single multi-station die to some of his customers.

The idea of carrying parts in a strip through a single multi-station die was a foreign concept to many local tool & die job shops and contract stamping companies. Many of Capitol&#;s customers scoffed at the idea and were unwilling to risk investing their time, money or reputations in the idea. According to Stouten, it took many attempts to find a shop owner who would consider his idea. Stouten made a paper strip layout and showed it to one of the local shop owners. The owner said he would try the idea only if Stouten agreed to pay for the die if it did not work.

Stouten did not have to pay for that die because it worked just as he had planned. What he had not planned was how quickly word would spread among shop owners in the area regarding the success of this idea of retaining the part in a strip. Soon, many stamping companies wanted to run stampings in progressive dies. This created a new problem: Many die designers at that time did not know how to make progressive dies work, so they had to be trained.

 In , the Grand Rapids chapter of the SME asked Stouten to speak about progressive dies at their monthly meeting. One of his die designers, Arnold Miedema, accompanied him to that meeting. Over the next two years Stouten and Miedema were invited to speak at every SME chapter in Michigan and one in Sarnia, Canada. They made drawings to use on an overhead projector to illustrate their concepts and soon attendees asked if they could get copies of the materials. This was the beginning of Capitol Engineering&#;s 266 page training course, Progressive Dies for Designers, Engineers and Managers.

In , Capitol Engineering was asked to present a three day seminar for SME on progressive dies in Dayton Ohio. For the next 30 years they conducted seminars from the east coast to the west coast in the U.S, from Canada to Mexico and even as far away as Singapore; a total of 133 three-day seminars in all.

We can never know exactly how large an impact people like Stouten and Miedema made on the metal stamping industry, both as innovators who were willing to take chances and as educators willing to share what they learned with others, but what we do know is that they played a significant role in progressive die history in terms of what many of us know and learned about designing and building progressive dies.  Although both men are no longer with us, their materials continue to be used in industry seminars, die design books, die making texts, professional association handbooks (e.g., ASM, SME), trade magazine columns and university course work. 

God bless you both.

The company is the world’s best sheet metal stamping supplier supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.