Ford stamping die failure case study

Alex visited Ford a few months earlier; saw massive die that stamps vehicle hoods from sheet plate. Wear components inside dies have complex geometries currently machined inefficiently from tool steel — Digital Alloys' second target market. Tom adds: dies weigh 200 tons, desk-height, highly polished; replacement urgency drives die-tooling economics (cannot sell cars when out of production).

That led us to tooling applications — molds and dies for molding, die casting, stamping, and so on. A lot of that industry is in automotive because of their volumes and the sizes of their parts. There's also a fair amount in consumer products, but a lot of that's over in China, and as a US company we said: what companies can we partner with here that are manufacturing parts here? A lot of the tooling in the US is automotive. So we're working with leading companies in aerospace on titanium components, and in automotive on tool steel for tooling. And it's not all conformal cooling applications — even just producing an insert that goes into a die. I was at Ford a few months ago and saw this massive die — the whole hood of a vehicle starts as a thin plate of steel or aluminum, and they put it into this massive die and it stamps it right into the shape of a hood. Inside of that die there are wear components — the parts around the edges that see the most force, that have the most intricate geometries, that have to bend the metal and cut the metal. We look at a lot of those parts that they're machining today. A lot of them look like those brackets — fairly complex shapes, really inefficient to machine. So we're printing simple-ish tool steel parts that are inefficient to make using machining right now, for companies like Ford.