Application Research Of In-die Tapping For Thin Sheet Metal Products

There are lots of threaded connection in mechanical equipment. About14%punching hole need to be threaded according to the statistic. The speed of punching is much higher than that of hole tapping, a tapping pipeline is required if hole tapping separate from punching, and that will cause a big direct cost up and in direct cost up.At present, there are a lot of examples of tapping in-die in the world, but the relative theory is not so complete, especially the tapping in-die for thin metal sheet products. In this paper, we make the application research by the up-case product of Nintendo Blu-ray game center, which is a kind of thin sheet metal product, by analysis of the characteristics of the thin sheet products, analysis of the possible problem in the punching process and the actual activity to prevent the actual problem in the tooling testing. By the experience of designing and manufacturing of the in-die tapping tooling, to reach the target of making a conclusion of in-die tapping theory.For the company, the main target of the paper is to achieve the target of forming the2threads of up-case in tooling, so that we can remove the tapping pipeline, no need to buy new tapping equipment, and reduce the cost of products manufacturing, and improve the production efficiency. As the thickness of this production is only0.4mm, the thickness of the tapping position which is after flanging process is less than0.4mm, there are not so much experience of in-die tapping for so thin products at present, there is no relevant information can be a reference.In the paper, according to the characteristics of sheet products and the structure of the product function, in the tooling design, we modified the product model according to the high requirement of nesting warping; add a strengthening design to the layout of the up-case; design a appropriate layout and put the tapping process in a appropriate position; design a die seat mounting structure of the floating plate and the floating limiting plate structure, and the redesign of the tap chuck structure, so that it can decrease free in the tapping process for leakage; optimize the parameters of the In-die tapping machine according the result of tooling testing that some tapping of the products may not form, we design a tool to assist the operation of in-die tapping machine adjusting, and improve the tap detection mechanism, which also has two functions of a broken tap tapping detection and leakage detection.By the final test result, the size and warping, surface quality of BLD up-case have reached the design requirements, the production can punch40pieces per minute, and the dynamic production is in a good condition. Till now, the tooling has produced about1.4million pieces, prove that the die structure scheme design is reasonable, and has achieve the target of this paper, provides a reliable application theory for the in-die tapping of production of the similar products.