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Italy-Vetimec, a company located in Bologna, provides molds for the international automotive industry and foundries, including injection molds. Since EDM is dominant in the production of these molds, the efficiency depends on the production of graphite electrodes. By switching to Hufschmied's special milling tools, Vetimec can now increase graphite processing speed by 30% and economy by 20%.
The Vetimec Group of Italy was established in 1962 to provide molds for the automotive industry. For the production of machinery and structural parts, mold manufacturers design, develop and manufacture complex and large die-casting, low-pressure and gravity die-casting molds and core boxes for the automotive industry. The manufacturer's equipment is used to produce aluminum and magnesium alloy structural parts and engine parts. When it comes to manufacturing injection molds, Vetimec's own tool production is a lever point to achieve a more efficient process. To this end, the company and its partners Exeron and PCam installed a high-performance manufacturing cell consisting of two Exeron HSC600/5 5-axis CNC milling centers, four Exeron EDM316 electro-erosion machines and a Zeiss coordinate measuring machine. PCam's handling system.
The requirements of the mold manufacturer for this robot cell are the fully automatic unmanned production of graphite electrodes, robot-assisted measurement and subsequent corrosion. Exeron adds its experience in this field to the collaboration. They conducted automated electrode production tests in their showroom and made an interesting proposal.
"If you want to manufacture overnight without personnel, your process needs to be reliable and maintenance-free. There is one aspect that worries us: so far, we don’t have any cutters with a long enough tool life. Worthy of working all night unattended,” explained Massimo Lolli, Vetimec's operations manager. "At Exeron, we learned about Hufschmied, a manufacturer of special tools. We want to test their Graftor series."
This is how Hufschmied Zerspanungssysteme entered the site, using their specific process tools to score points, especially using materials that cause problems, such as glass and carbon fiber composites, plastics, ceramics, hardened steel up to 72 HRC, and graphite. Stefano Barbagallo, European Sales Director of Hufschmied Zerspanungssysteme, said: “We provided advice to Vetimec and developed a milling strategy for its existing process parameters so that the company can obtain meaningful results from milling tests.”
“In our milling tests, we compared tool life and milling results. We also evaluated tool costs, the number of milling tool variants required, and the programming effort,” says Massimo Lolli. “The results show that Hufschmied’s Graftor strategy actually provides us with clear advantages in every aspect, both in terms of cost-effectiveness and process reliability. We run fully automated 24/7 operations to ensure that the required manufacturing tolerances are ±0.010 mm while ensuring process reliability.” Vetimec conducted long-term testing and reached an annual framework contract six months after the initial meeting. Decided to completely switch graphite processing to the Graftor series.
The tool series has a diameter range of 0.5 to 12 mm, allowing the integration of roughing and finishing into a single milling operation. “The patented four cutting edge geometry significantly reduces the cutting force due to the two opposite roughing and finishing cutting edges designed to push and pull,” explains Stefano Barbagallo. "The main advantage is that the finished surface quality can be obtained through high feed rate and feed rate. While using the complete cutting edge length, the complete remaining material can be finished." Graftor can handle depths up to 3 x D Feed (ap) and side feed up to 0.65 x D (ae), so it can withstand larger steps in the finishing process. This means fewer machining steps and fewer tool sizes are required to create the final contour. Due to the low cutting pressure, it is possible to produce filament-like contours, such as tapered pins with a diameter of 0.080 mm.
All electrodes are automatically measured in the PCam cell and assisted by a robot on a Zeiss CNC coordinate measuring machine. Since the electrode is measured together with the holder, the zero point is always defined. (Source: Hufschmied Zerspanungssysteme)
The geometric accuracy of the graphite milling cutter is very high (±0.005 mm), and the gauge block mark is marked on the tool axis. The tool series has a nanocrystalline diamond coating (DIP) developed and patented by Hufschmied to ensure maximum wear resistance. This patented tool enables suppliers to deal with the particular challenge of the material, which is that graphite cannot be processed in the proper sense because the material is not plastically deformable. Machining will not produce debris, but will knock out particles from the composite material. This will cause the undesirable graphite dust to have a strong abrasive effect on the cutting edge of the tool. Since the wire-like graphite structure of the electrode is easily broken, the material optimized geometry of the milling cutter must not only ensure the best removal of material, but also eliminate vibration and reduce force during machining.
The Graftor tool has increased Vetimec's graphite processing speed by 30%. An interesting finding is that the cost savings are not only because of longer tool life, but also because of the wider use of roughing and finishing tools. This means fewer tool changes are required. Reducing the number of tools also significantly reduces the workload required for NC programming and tool presetting. Massimo Lolli said: "Hufschmied's tools have played an important role in the process optimization of our electrode production. We have increased our economy by 20% in this area. Our customers have also benefited from this because we can now deliver high precision faster Injection mold."
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