EoW July 2009

Feature

Photo courtesy of Tien Chen Diamond Industry Co Ltd

Dies & die shop equipment I ndustry has its lingua franca and basic vocabulary. An inch is an inch – and a good thing, too. For those present-day Franks who prefer millimetres, conversion is the matter of a moment. Mutual understanding is assured. But dies for wire making – customised, uniquely matched to a product with an almost incredible workload relative to its weight and mass – call for re assurance. We want a die shop to tell us it is capable of programming full CAD-CAM 3-D surface modelling and CNC automation; that its expertise extends to closed die sinking, hammer dies, press dies, cold form dies, trim dies, and progressive dies through the latest revisions of SmartCAM, AutoCAD, and Anvil software. Here, the more pro-speak, the better. The providers of the goods and services profiled in this section of EuroWire are proficient in a language that would render speechless any time-travelling die makers from a century ago. But both sets of professionals would readily grasp, and heartily endorse, this from The International Library of Technology (Copyright 1903): “Laying out the die is a matter that requires a great deal of judgment.”

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EuroWire – July 2009