CNC punching sheet metal tooling
The Trumpf 3000R CNC punch press holds all its tooling in tool holders held on a rail at the back of the machine along with the sheet holding clamps. The tooling sets can easily be swapped over from job to job and usually a tooling set up only takes a few minutes making it the perfect machine for small batches and prototypes but also very quick when punching larger batches of work.
CNC punch, die and stripper plate
For a CNC punch press to produce a hole a tooling set consisting of 3 separate parts is needed, a punch, a die and a stripper plate. The punch fits through the stripper plate and then the sheet metal and finally into the die. There is a very close match between the punch and die with a small clearance on the die to allow the punch and material to fit through e.g. 0.2mm for 1mm mild steel. The stripper plate is designed to help strip the sheet metal off the punch once it is pulled back out of the die before moving to its next position to punch again. The whole punching process only takes a fraction of a second which makes this machine very productive on any sheet metal work that needs a lot of holes punched into it.
CNC punched holes in sheet metal work
Here we have a simple example of mild steel having been CNC punched with a couple of different sized round tools and some overlapping rectangular tools to produce the slots at different angles. You can see the nibble marks where the tools overlapped slightly in cutting the shape as we didn’t have the exact tool sizes the customer had designed in their drawing. This is the great advantage of CNC punching with a Trumpf machine in that it’s so easy to nibble with tools to produce the shape you need without damaging the standard tools and dies.
We have many standard tools which should satisfy most peoples needs but if you are not sure please give us a call and we will be happy to discuss your design needs and how we can help you.