The professor told us to read the chapter before the next class.
The professor instructed us to read the chapter prior to the upcoming class. That was the moment where he could see everything and you understand what’s happening - it’s a hard manufacturing process to describe. I’ve tried to describe it to people in five minutes or less and you just can’t. You can’t ASP Destin and welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I love things that are made in America. I love seeing the Made in America stamp on there, like look at this lawnmower for example. I’m outside of a big hardware store now. This engine is made in Auburn, Alabama and it’s assembled in Tennessee apparently, but the components for that engine are made all over. In fact, the components for this engine, which I happen to have one right here, this is a Briggs and Stratton engine. It’s got little sheet metal there, it’s got shrouds on that stuff like that. Those shrouds are made on the other side of those trees and a really cool manufacturing facility and today we’re going to learn about that. It’s a process called sheet metal stamping and it is fascinating. How would you do that? That is a complicated geometry, there’s so many little holes and bins at certain angles. Furthermore, how would you do it on an even smaller scale? Almost everything I interact with, like a machine or something you like a lawnmower, is something you ride. They all have these little bent metal pieces in them and we’re about to learn how these parts are made.
Today we’re going to start the Smarter Everyday Deep Dive Series into Manufacturing and I am so excited about this. We’re going to start today with a process called metal stamping. The specific type of stamping is called progressive metal stamping. A coil of metal is unwound and fed into a press and a very special tool bangs out parts and advances the parts along without anyone touching it and you have finished parts falling out the other side. This is a fascinating process. In this series, we’re going to look at all kinds of amazing processes. If you haven’t subscribed to the Smarter Everyday email list now would be a good time to do that smarterveryday.com/email-list so that you can know when these videos come out because this is about to be amazing.
I’m going to say something that’s a little weird. My generation was taught to go get a STEM degree. It’s very important. I think there’s two things that are super important now. We need to get back to the humanities. We need to learn more about rhetoric and how to talk to each other and we also need to learn about manufacturing. Local manufacturing is about to be a giant thing, so I don’t want you to just think I need to go learn how to be a computer programmer. You should consider learning part of a manufacturing process because these skills are about to be incredibly important.
Let’s get started with metal stamping and go get smarter every day. So to learn more about how these parts are made, we’re here in Athens, Alabama at a place called TNC Stamping. They are wizards when it comes to sheet metal manufacturing and they have some really interesting techniques and I want to show you. Let’s go meet a guy named Weston here at TNC Stamping. Good to see you again. You doing all right? Yeah, yeah, good to see you. Okay, so this is Weston and I’m Destin and we’re Ken somehow. Do you know how we’re Ken? Uh, I don’t. I just I don’t either. Our aunts or moms tell us we’re Ken all the time and we have no idea. But you have a really cool sheet metal manufacturing facility and I wanted to make a video about it because I love it. Is it called a plant? We call it a plant. We’ve got a hundred thousand square feet here in Athens. You actually manufacture things here. We actually manufacture metal stamping. So we do some what we call sub-assemblies as well, but um yeah, we do all that right here as well as build the tooling and that’s kind of what sets us apart is a lot of metal stamping plants don’t build their own tooling so that’s we do all of that here. So we’ll start in the tool shop. We’ll get to look at some dies up close and you kind of get an idea of what a stamping die actually is and then we’ll go out. Yep, so this is already at 90, so when it leaves this area, we’re just kicking this one angle up to 90. Yep, that makes sense. You said these are side actions, so if you push, can I push? Sure, but it’s not going to move a little bit, get a little motion. So if you push, how do you get a swing arm in there? This is the pad that actually strikes the back side of that block and does the pushing, but how do you take a vertical motion here and turn it into a left and right motion? There’s a 45 degree angle on this slide right here, and once it meets it, it just has a spring return. Got it. This is ridiculous, Weston. This is crazy. It’s pretty wild.
And then how many of these can you make in a day? Like thousands? Yeah, this is got 54,000 parts on it now. It’s gotten a little bit of the bell edge on one area, and so we’re going to sharpen the cut off. That’s amazing to bring that back up to a good surface, so you’re reworking this progressive die right now? Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s awesome.
If you were to buy this tool overseas, let’s just say if you were to buy this in China, a lot of this would be one piece of steel. We make it modular so dodge deals can be taken at inserts, die stills can be taken out and sharpened as needed, because if this were one die seal, this was one piece of steel, maintenance would be virtually impossible. It would be a lot of work.
This die here is probably built in the 70s. It has 600-500-600,000 hits a year, usually closer to 500,000 hits a year. If you do the math, this die’s been in operation since the 70s.
We talked a little bit about the sponsor for today’s video, it’s AnyDesk. This is an amazing product. AnyDesk is remote desktop software that works with any of your devices. If you have a problem like I do, I have a computer that I edit smarter every day on, it’s like capable of editing 4K, I need to do things from this specific computer and that’s what AnyDesk does in an amazing way. You can get a phone app and you can log in to the computer and you can edit from your phone, not that you would want to, but you totally can. You can type in a password or you can accept if you’re like the host client. It’s an incredible piece of software and it just nails it. This is legitimately incredible software. In fact, it solved a problem on my recent video.