Manufacturing cost reduction techniques for automobile crankcase mould inserts

Abstract

The manufacturing of automobile moulds is itself a challenging job and very tedious task requiring high accuracy of component profiles. The required complicated and complex profiles are generated when the mould inserts are relinquished from several numbers of workstations, which run for a longer process time. As the accuracy needed for the component area is very high and it (insert) has to pass through several bottleneck workstations, the production time and increased buffer time are observed. This chapter focuses on providing economical methods for manufacturing hot die steel inserts. These techniques are implemented on a pressure die-casting insert component. The present solution is derived for manufacturing time reduction and minimisation of the die-casting inserts (moving and fixed die) at every stage. Implementing combined electrodes, assembly machining and cluster plate machining/sparking techniques are critical development advancements in the research. In the combined electrode concept, one electrode is designed in the same area to cover multiple areas that were initially covered by separate individual electrodes. Furthermore, this concept is outstretched by the cluster plate concept. Those electrodes that cannot be covered by a single electrode are machined together to act as a single electrode and later separated while individual sparking. Combined electrode design, assembly machining and cluster machining/sparking of the electrodes reduce the total machining time of the die and the machining centre. Reducing the machine run time will reduce the production cost and increase profit. The results achieved show that the combined electrode design setup shows 75% savings in the combined sparking setup, whereas the cluster plate machining setup shows 35% savings in the tool list generation (from software used) of the net savings. The proposed solution opens up new avenues for similar automobile components by setting benchmarks to decrease the rope length associated with manufacturing and increase profit.