Person

Dies I Built and What They Taught Me

KR Klaus Reinhardt

Thirty-one years of tooling comes down to a few jobs that changed how I work. Here are three of them, plus what I hand my night class on the first evening. If you run a tool room and want the strip layouts, ask and I will send them.

01 Three Dies

The tools I point to when somebody asks what I actually do. One built new, one rescued from scrap, one that taught me an expensive lesson about pilots.

Eight Station Terminal Clip Progression, 2011

Built new for a shop in Solon. Still running fifteen years later at eighty strokes a minute with nothing replaced but wear details.

Customer needed 2.4 million clips a year in half hard brass, 0.6mm, four bends and a coined radius. The die house quote was fourteen weeks. I built it in seven. Strip layout was the whole job. I put two idle stations in that everybody told me were wasted, one after the pierce and one before the final form, because brass moves and I wanted the pilots to have somewhere to catch it. That is why the tool is still running. The wear details get reground every eighteen months and the sections have never been off the shoe. What I learned: idle stations are cheap and downtime is not. If a customer wants me to cut two stations out of a layout to save a thousand dollars in steel, I put the number in writing and let them decide.

The Rescue, 400 Ton Seat Bracket Tool

A die the customer had already written off. Two weeks of section work brought it back for about nine percent of a replacement.

They ran a form section into a slug that had not ejected. Cracked the section clean through, bent two pilots and galled the draw radius. Their engineering group priced a replacement tool at a hundred and sixty thousand with a five month lead. I cut the cracked section out, made a new one from S7, preheated and welded the build up on the draw radius, reground and polished the whole form, and made new pilots on the wire. Fourteen thousand dollars, eleven working days, and it made parts on the first hit. The useful part was the slug ejection, which was the actual cause. Added an air blast and a slug relief, and it has not happened again in six years.

The One I Got Wrong

A trim die I built too tight on clearance in 1998. It taught me to check material certs and not the material label on the rack.

Young and confident. I ground clearance for the mild steel on the print and the strip that showed up was a harder grade that somebody had loaded in the wrong rack. Punches chipped inside a hundred hits. My foreman did not chew me out. He walked me to the rack, showed me the cert tag on the coil, and asked why I had not read it. That was worse than being chewed out and I have read every cert since. I open my night class with this story so the kids know that the man teaching them has scrapped punches too.
02 What I Hand the Apprentices

Two nights a week at the union hall, second year die class. This is what the first evening looks like and what they leave with.

File a Block Square

First night, no machines. A block of cold rolled, a mill file, a square and a surface plate, and you do not go home until it passes.

It takes most of them three hours. A couple have taken two evenings. Nobody has failed. The point is not filing. Almost nobody files for a living now. The point is that you learn what half a thousandth feels like under your thumb, you learn to check your own work instead of waiting for inspection to tell you, and you learn that the machine is not the skill. After that first night they go on the grinder and the wire, and they are faster at both than the ones who started there.

The Strip Layout Drill

Every student lays out the same bracket eight different ways before touching CAD, then defends the one they picked.

Same part every year: a stamped mounting bracket, three holes, two bends, one extruded boss. Eight layouts on paper, pencil and a scale. They argue about station count, pilot placement, whether to extrude before or after the bend, and carrier design. Half of them get to a good answer they cannot explain and half get to a bad answer they can explain very well. Both are fixable. By week four they are laying out real jobs I have in the shop, and I have taken two of their ideas into production.