Semiautomatic surface reconstruction in forging dies

Abstract

The reuse of damaged stamps or forging dies is a key aspect of the forging process. Whenever a forging die must be repaired the damaged zones are filled with welding material to be later machined. In this process, some phases can be optimized as the amount of welding material and moreover the machining tool paths and parameters. With the introduction of new digitization technologies new possibilities in the automatization of the machining are arisen. Thanks to the application of reverse engineering techniques, good and smoothed contours are extracted from the digitized geometry. The machining phase based on the obtained contours is considerably reduced in time and it does not involve any significant problem. The obtaining of these contours is the most complicated step of the proposed methodology. Some tests with diverse forging dies and mixed contours have been performed. The operations defined in this paper perform in an optimal way in all the cases. The repairs are analyzed and the required times in the actual and the proposed processes are compared.