Choosing the Right Surface Finishing Process for Your Tooling
Optimize Your Tooling with Surface Finishing Processes
Surface finishing covers a broad range of industrial processes that remove, add, or alter the material to improve the appearance and durability of the finished tooling. Choosing the right surface finishing process is crucial to optimizing your operations.
Do You Need Surface Finishing?
Surface finishing is often required for tooling in various industries. The surface finish of tools can significantly impact their performance, durability, and the quality of the final products they produce.
There are several reasons why surface finishing is important for tooling.
Increased Corrosion Resistance
Finishing your tooling by applying a barrier between the metal and the outside elements changes the surface of the metal, making it more resistant to corrosion.
Eliminates Surface Defects
Thorough finishing can minimize any defects or deformities, ensuring your tooling creates parts with tight tolerances.
Better Aesthetics
Finishing metal gives it a smooth, shiny finish that is appealing to the eye.
Better Release Properties
In certain tooling applications, such as plastic injection molding and die casting, a good surface finish is necessary to ensure the proper release of the finished parts. Smooth surfaces with low friction coefficients allow the parts to be ejected easily and reduce the likelihood of sticking or damage.
Types of Surface Finishing Processes
Polishing
Polishing achieves a smooth and glossy finish by removing imperfections, scratches, and roughness through the abrasion of the surface using abrasive materials, like polishing compounds or fine grit abrasives.
Grinding
Grinding is used to achieve precise dimensions, improve surface roughness, and remove surface defects by using an abrasive wheel to remove material from the surface of the tool.
Pivot Punch: Straight Ground® Punch
Pivot Precision’s exclusive grinding process Straight Ground® Punch is used for opening new fields for punch presses and improving the quality of punch products. This finishing process provides many advantages to punched products including reduction of galling, snapback, pick up, or firing, easy punch withdrawal, and straight shearing with less tonnage required. Straight Ground® Punch also allows you to punch holes to size with less stripping pressure, reduce buckling, and reduce rollover and dimpling on thin material.
Coating
A thin layer of material is deposited on the surface of the tool, creating a coating. This provides various benefits, such as improved wear resistance, reduced friction, increased hardness, and enhanced corrosion resistance.
Heat Treatment
Using heating and cooling of the tooling material alters its properties to create desired characteristics. Annealing, hardening, tempering, or case hardening can achieve hardness, toughness, or dimensional stability.
What Type of Surface Finishing is Right for Your Tooling?
Your finishing needs will depend entirely on your project and what your goals are for your tooling. When trying to choose your finish, it is important to take function, cost, and aesthetics into consideration. You will want to choose the finish that will help your tool complete the job without costing you a fortune. Looks are also something to take into consideration because while you want your products to work the best they can, you also want them to look and feel great.
Talking to an Experienced Tooling Manufacturer Can Help You Determine What’s Right for You
At Pivot Precision, we offer advanced surface finishing solutions to improve the look, feel, and lifespan of your tooling. Our cryogenic metal treatments alter the properties of the metal, resulting in fewer imperfections and greater durability. Heat treating also increases durability by altering the microstructure of the metal while also altering some of its other properties. Regardless of the finishing process, we focus on corrosion resistance, eliminating surface defects, and the appearance of your tooling, and with our ISO Certification, you know you are getting the best product possible.
Contact our team to learn more about our finishing capabilities.