We’ve got a progressive stamping die running connector terminals for an automotive electrical supplier — one of our longer-running production programs. The parts are stamped from 0.018″ phosphor bronze strip, and the die runs 12 stations including blanking, forming, piercing, and a final cutoff. At 400 strokes per minute, we’re making a lot of parts in a hurry.
The die was built in-house about three years ago and has been maintained regularly. Strip feeding is handled by a servo feeder with automatic alignment detection — if the strip wanders, the press stops before anything crashes. That’s saved us more than a few times. Tooling gets inspected and touched up every 500,000 hits, and we track wear on the critical punches closely.
Current production is around 8 million parts per year. Scrap rate runs under 0.3%, which is where we want to be on this kind of job. The customer does 100% electrical testing on their end, so any missed forms or bad dimensions show up quickly. Keeping the die maintained and the strip quality consistent is what keeps those numbers where they need to be. This is the kind of bread-and-butter production stamping work we’ve been doing for 20 years.