Peterson Manufacturing Company is a leading manufacturer of vehicle safety lighting, mirrors, reflectors and other related products. Headquartered in Grandview, Mo., the company supplies lighting systems to well-known brands such as Harely-Davidson, Caterpillar and John Deere.
For the past six years or so the company has used stamping punches and dies from Impax® Tooling Solutions in the production of many of its products.
When they first started using the tooling to manufacture a particular taillight, they were getting about 75,000 cycles out of the punch before needing to take it out of service and have it sharpened or remanufactured.
This unnecessary tool wear was creating downtime and increasing tooling costs, so the company began to test a variety of coatings and alternate tool steels offered by Impax Tooling Solutions®.
“Our tool and die shop began using stamping components manufactured with Wilson Tool’s 10V tool steel and OptimaX® coating in the production of our tooling because it more than doubled our tool life between sharpening,” said Walt Acurso, automation manager for Peterson Manufacturing Company.
Peterson Manufacturing found that by simply changing the tool steel from the standard M2 offered by Impax to the higher quality 10V tool steel, they doubled the tool life between sharpening.
Then, when they added Impax Tooling Solutions®’ exclusive OptimaX® coating, they doubled the tool life again to close to 300,000 cycles before needing to take the tooling out of service.
OptimaX® is a two-part coating process that offers all the wear resistance and hardness of Impax Tooling Solutions®’ popular Optima® coating, plus provides added lubricity and further reduces galling. It’s ideal for stamping material such as aluminum as well as forming applications.
Now, Peterson Manufacturing specifies 10V tool steel and OptimaX® coating on all of their stamping tooling and in doing so has found additional benefits.
“We’ve also noticed that using OptimaX® on our draw dies not only increased the tool life of that die, but the surface finish on the part was so much better we were able to eliminate a secondary polishing operation, saving us time and money,” said Walt Acurso.
By choosing higher quality 10V tool steel and OptimaX® premium coating through Impax Tooling Solutions®, Peterson Manufacturing has been able to increase tool life, eliminate secondary operations and improve the quality of the parts they produce.
October 01, 2013