I spent many years in an EDM shop (wire and sink) and always thought that watching a wire EDM in action is equivalent to watching grass grow or paint dry. You (and your video team) made it exciting and very interesting.
@@trevorgoforth8963 but damn, those cuts are precise. There's a DIY Qire-EDM solution, I was thinking about building one for my hobby shop - but the needed arc generator from BAXEDM is over $3000. That's a solid investment for a hobby project. I've seem some people trying to build them themself out of an old stickwelder - but the precision comes with the timing - and an estimate won't really do.
I am neither a machinist nor an engineer. I've watched many EDM videos and wondered how it could be done without leaving a kerf. Yours is the first video that explained the process and clearly detailing how it is done. I suppose others merely assumed that their viewers already knew that it required *TWO* different blanks.
hello bud, its correct. whenever you cut something into two, a gap is created to at least the width of the blade, no matter how small the blade may be! Apparently also including a blade 1/4 the sized of human hair! Crazy!
The first piece I ever made like that was back in 1985 with our first SODICK 1WH Wire machine. First attempt was spot on with some attention paid to the details in the program while taking into account the wire diameter and the ensuing "overburn" as a result of the spark gap. The part was presented to the company President and he was amazed. That sold him on the technology and we over the years had purchased over 10 more wire EDM machines.
Growing up in the USSR, as an aerospace college student I had a summer job in 1990 at a plant in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) making parts for various missiles. They had a row of basic versions of this same machine (among other cool stuff).
I must admit man has done some pretty cool things. The technology in that shop is top notch all of which are huge boat anchors out of water. What’s really cool is the brilliant minds designing the machines and the brilliant minds running them. Beautiful piece of art Trevor and thanks for sharing.
Zero tolerance has little to no application in real life as far as moving parts are involved. You need tolerance to offset shrinkage and expanding of materials. That's the very basics of material science.
It's not zero tolerance, just very very precise. Tolerances on wire EDM are as low as 2 micron but that's not zero. Things like gauge blocks have even tighter tolerances and you can clearly tell because they "stick" together due to Van Der Walls forces as if there was glue holding them together, yet there is nothing, just blocks of steel.
They are using an iron alloy know as an Invar. "Invar, alloy of iron that expands very little when heated; it contains 64 percent iron and 36 percent nickel." "Lohaus says it had been long suspected that this behavior was somehow related to magnetism because only certain alloys that are ferromagnetic (capable of being magnetized) behave as invars." "As the temperature of an Invar rises, the spin state of some of those electrons increasingly flips. As a result, the electrons become more comfortable cozying up to their neighboring electrons. Typically, this would cause the Invar to contract as it warmed up. But here, the Invar's atoms also vibrating more, taking up more room. The contraction due to changing spin states and the atomic vibration expansion counteract each other, and the Invar stays the same size."
Man, every day you are progressing more and more, you are going towards the top, for sure, in this way, you will reach one million subscribers very quickly BOOM 💥 For a few years, pieces like this puzzled me, but now I know the secret of this craft, thanks to you Mr trevor 🌷
This is a brilliant fit, very impressive, kudos to you. I was a prototype machinist in 1984 and learned to use a Charmilles wire EDM. We made some basic parts, but there was no skim cutting available. I made a “punch & dye” of my first name, but they did not fit together, close but no cigar. We then got a 4 axis Mitsubishi with skim cutting. Made a couple of name plates for senior managers. The die from steel and punch from brass, the fit was not as good as Titan, but it impressed the bosses. Can’t imagine what it cost, all the programming was manual, but then again, we were an expense department!
I remember when I was in machinist class and the instructor demonstrated zero tolerance. He had two pieces of perfectly machined surfaces of steel blocks. When you slide them across each other, they would stick together. Air tight contact.
If you try this at home…. Make certain that your steels are both annealed or the amount of warping after cut will make your fit impossible. Nice video Trevor!
Man excellent job! I miss working in a tool shop… for that reason. Moved into quality later in life for automotive industry but still use that background to establish root cause and be able to explain to others how parts are made…..
A great many people appreciate the tactile and precision art qualities of things like this. You could produce a “punch and die” set like this as an executive desk toy and sell a million of them. I would definitely love to have one.
Belo vídeo Travor , achei o trabalho muito bom , conheço muito bem esse tipo de usinagem e sei o quanto é complexo ,gosto muito das postagens que vocês compartilham , parabéns 👋👋
I think it might have passed by the surface grinder as well. I might even think it took the same amount of time at the grinder as it has in the EDM machine.
Ido a fair bit of W edm If i make a punch i may leave 2 or 3 tags and finish the part before de tagging but then surface grind the start point for the tags Thinking of trying hot glue when i get a chance
In this case I clamped it to the table and wire cut the tab side for the second op. I purposely cut in a little on each side of that face so I had a place to find my edge and tilt my axis. That way you're not relying on indicator accuracy and trying to get it perfectly straight but instead your using the machines accuracy, touching each side with the wire and tilting the axis.
That was amazing !!!! How in the hell did they cut stone with that much precision when building the pyramids? No CNC back then . Whats so cool about yall's channel, I can finally show my wife what I do at work. I mean with out the clean floors and grinding dust everywhere. It's exactly the same.
ok ngl first 15 secs BLEW MY MIND. I thought it was CGI, like a Blender model, until I saw the hand. I heard that super precision machined parts had invisible seams but holy shit man
I'm confused to as how you get the wire in for the die? As with the punch it was cut from the edge, if it's a wire in assuming it's like a really precise bandsaw.
That fit gave me goosebumps. Considering your shop is well temperated at 20°C/68°F for precise measurement, I wonder how the fit works at 0°C or +40°C? Might be fun to watch.
I love it. We had an agie cut classic and the manager at the time wanted me too run it but it hadnt been ran since the early 2000s. I read and read the book checked the de ionized water, Checked my pulse, flush, had the wire auto feed working. Everything. Only had floppy copy programs and we didn't have the right software or something. The world and me will never know.
It's kinda incredible that even with how precise that block is and the punch, air was still able pass, allowing the punch to rest into place at 6:00! Or did you have an air hole cut into the stand, underneath where you got that shot?
@@trevorgoforth8963 Hello Trevor, how do you stop the workpiece from falling into the tank? do you go most of the way around and then put a magnet on the bottom where it has already machined, then start the program going again and then it wont fall?
When my 3rd cousins husband [ biiiiiig Irish family ;-) ] worked for Ilmor [ Mercedes F1 racing :-D ] he called the machine a 'hot wire eroder', it was 10 years ago ;-) PS I also felt the rush when you slid the part to the edge to let it drop as you let the air in. Put that in an average press and your corners would be burger though, lol, great work.
If it was zero tolerance, it would never come back apart. It would “optical contact bond”. Whoever’s interested in this would be into it! Very similar to ringing gauge blocks.
I used to work on Wire EDM, now on a CNC turning machines and oh boy I miss Wire EDM, satisfaction on cuts like these when 2 parts align perfectly are way above turning parts.
Давным-давно , ещё в юности видел как слесарь "дядя Вася" на спор, врукопашную изготовил два кубика . Причем при сложении их ЛЮБЫМИ двумя гранями и опускании в керосин , эти грани оставались СУХИМИ !!! А так то да , технология впечатляет.
I'm a Tool & Die Maker and ran everything in the shop.... An EDM can cut things out as fast as a person could on a bandsaw with a course blade if you really want it to.. The accuracy will be less but perhaps for clearance on a stripper it wont matter. As long as you get your offsets correct and settings for speed... perhaps a second pass where there is just a touch more sparking... It's actually not that difficult to make. Looks cool but is not difficult.
That is great idea to make Safe Box on the Wall a bit bigger to install inside of the property even in living area and then when you will open it Stick a piece of Magnet and pull it
That depends on many things, in this case we only used one rough and two trims which left us with about a 25 RMS. If we used 5 trim cuts you can get down to a 10 easy. In carbide you can get as low as 4 micro inches.
@@trevorgoforth8963 I don't believe it's exactly correct to spec an EDM finish in terms of RMS. RMS is more of an indication of a consistent finish in a specified direction. Think about the very, very fine "thread" type finish you get on a lathe in one direction. Even less applicable in carbide because if you magnify an EDM'd finish in carbide enough, you actually see something that looks like concrete with divots and pockmarks, no "grain" structure. Very picky comment though, this was a very, very cool video. Thanks for the great work.
how did you finish the punches on the side that was holding it to the vise? did you machine it manually? because you can't do that on the EDM or the piece will sink or rotate a little bit ruining the tolerances.
They cut most of that side in the wire EDM except for a small tab. Any ideas how they remove the tab without cutting that face? I would leave material and bring it to the surface grinder, especially since the punch has parallel faces, but I don't think that's what they did here
@@LousyBlowfish I do that all the time,leave a small tab and grind it later. Otherwise you have to rotate the punch and make a second operation to finish the other side
I have not ran a WEDM in almost 20 years. Now it is probably $200-$300 an hour. 6 to 8 hours for both parts. I could finish both those in less than a 10 hour day. I do not know how fast they cut today.
Hi Trevor, What an outstanding workpiece is the one that you fabricated,I am really really impressed,Doe,s the machine makes the cut under the water to compensate for temperature differences on the cutting edge ? and so avoid expansion in the material ?.Thank you so much for these kind of superb videos,
Ok, dumb question time: when cutting the punch, why does it not fall out of the shell? Do you have to leave some kind of tab that keeps it from shifting in the cavity or dropping to the bottom of the tank?
A few questions: Firstly, I run a laser cutter at a sheet metal shop. I run the old pulsar lasers (Amada LC-2415), but we have one of the "newer" Amada fiber lasers (I put "newer" in quotes because we bought it in 2017). The kerf on the pulsar laser is around 0.005" (I think it's thinner in the fiber). I know this is a stretch with the pulsars, but I don't see why you couldn't achieve around the same micron level precision with a fiber laser if you adjusted the offset correctly and controlled the position of the head to micron precision (albeit, on sheets that are much less than an inch). What makes EDM more precise than laser cutting? Is it more about the precision in that thick of a piece, or is just demonstrably more precise than laser cutting in general? Or could it be that attaining the level of precision you get with EDM requires extremely high mechanical advantage to move in such tiny increments (so much so that the movement becomes glacial) and running a laser at that slow a speed could fry the laser of cause other issues? Also, what do you use a die set that precise for? Is it for some kind of extrusion? I was under the impression that punch and die sets are used to punch, emboss, form, or generally shape a work piece in some way, and I thought you always need clearance for that. What can you do with a clearance of around a micron???? It's freaking awesome! I'm just very curious.
How do you hold the "punch" part? If you have to cut completely around it, where can you grip it? The video kind of briefly shows you removing it from the machine but too quickly to see any detail. Did you have a magnet holding on to an existing flat surface? Or if you cut it completely through, would that not leave a burr on the corner? The part seemed to be still hanging onto the machine when finished so that seems to rule out cutting completely around it.
You guys should make/cut out a puzzle of at least eight similar looking pieces and try and solve it. With so much precision only the exact piece of course should fit.
