the solidworks savings plan

As most of you know, the economy that we are in right now can be cut throat for most companies.  Any area that you can find to cut costs when submitting a quote need to be looked at because your competitors are.  In the industry that I work in, which is deep draw metal stamping, one of the big factors of cost are steel costs.  For those that are not familiar with metal stamping there is usually a fair amount of material that gets cut off and thrown away for each part that comes out of the press.  This unfortunately is just the nature of the industry but there are definitely some things that you can do to eliminate as much of this scrap as possible.  One of the things you want to do is make sure that you don’t have a bigger blank than what you actually need.  What is a blank you ask?  The blank is the pierce of steel, normally round in deep draw metal stamping, that you use to create your final part through a series of drawing, squaring, piercing, and trimming processes.

Before SolidWorks

Before our company made the giant step of purchasing SolidWorks we just used a 2D CAD package for all of our tooling designs.  The process of determining what size our blank should be for all new parts that we received was a well thought out spreadsheet formula that took many things into account and then spit out a blank size for us to use.  Well, more times than not, the blank that we had for these jobs came out much bigger than what we needed which resulted in either too much scrap being tossed out or the need to spend more money on tooling to make the blank sizes more accurate.

Using SolidWorks

The reason for our company to purchase SolidWorks was not really related to this at all but we soon found out that there were some tools available inside the software package that allowed us a more accurate size to start with.  Here is what we have developed as a company standard now for determining what size blank we should base our tooling off of.

1. The initial step consists of us modeling up the part (picture below) to match the customer print that we received.  Many times there are other important factors that the customer print provides us such as starting material thickness.
2. Next up we will want to fill in the pierce holes on the part (if it has any) and then add a ring to the top of the part that we can trim away to give a nice crisp edge.
3. From this part we can now use some SolidWorks functionality to help us out.  We now take this part and find out what the volume of the model is (Tools > Mass Properties > Volume).  This gives us a number that we would want our blank to match.
4. We now model up a blank (round disk, picture above) that is the thickness that our customer provided us on the print for starting material thickness.  Now by changing the diameter of the blank we can match this model’s volume to that of the volume that was determined in step 3.

This method has become for useful for us and gives us a very accurate number to base our blank size off of and there for the rest of the tool.

How About You

So here is what I am wondering.  How do you use the volume tool?  Do you use it at all?  By seeing something like this post do you think you have an application that you could begin using it for?

Drop me a comment and let me know.