January 2009 eNews

No penalty for clips with fourslide manufacturing process

When manufacturing costs and short lead times became important issues, a specialty provider of wireless communication gear to many District 1A college football teams turned to a company called Fourslide Spring and Stamping Inc. for its belt clips and battery contacts.

“In our case, we needed to keep the tooling costs down on these parts,” said Alan Cummings, mechanical engineer for CoachComm, an Auburn, AL, company. “For parts such as these, the tooling cost would have just about killed us.

“This solution gave us the opportunity to avoid that cost and get high-quality parts at a quick turnaround at the same time.”

Fourslide, of Bristol, CT, named for the manufacturing process used, provides these belt clips and battery contacts.

The fourslide manufacturing process takes raw material in flat strip form from a coil that is then stamped in progressive dies. Once stamped or blanked out, the strip moves into a forming section to which four tool-carrying slides approach from four surrounding points. Forming is accomplished by tools striking from any or all of four directions, forming the part around a center form. The process can be seen in animation at www.fourslide.com/fourslide-reference.htm.

In addition to saving tooling costs and lead times, there are other advantages that the fourslide process has over larger power press runs.

With complex forms, for example, tooling for power press can become prohibitively expensive and in some cases, cannot even be done. Because of the flexibility provided by multiple axes, the fourslide process can execute multiple bends, bends beyond 90 degrees, twists, cylindrical forms and tapped holes in one single run. Contacts, like the parts Fourslide makes for CoachComm, are suited to the fourslide process.

Another advantage is the capacity for design changes between runs, such as when technology advances and improves, or even when an initial design is found to need improvement. Such tooling changes in a power press environment can be many times more expensive.

There are also cases when the needed quantity will not justify the cost of progressive die tooling for power press. Because tooling for the fourslide process is less expensive, shorter runs are far better suited to the fourslide process.

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Fourslide Spring and Stamping Inc.

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