CNC punching alumnium sheet
Once again I am writing a quick blog post on our Trumpf 200 CNC punch press. This machine seems to have so many features and tooling options to talk about that there is always something new to share. This time it’s using punch tooling to press in electrical earth symbols into an aluminium plate. Once we have a tool it’s a matter of moments to insert it into the tool rail on the machine and then it’s ready for use. We simply program the tool as we would say punching a hole but the tool just presses in whatever has been engraved onto it’s surface. The picture also shows a good efficient use of material and punching time with common line slit cutting in the x and y axis between each component.
CNC punched chassis plates
As well as the earth symbol that has been featured in the post you can see that the aluminium plate was made up from a range of simple single hits with round, obround and rectangular hits, just the thing a CNC punch press is so good at. All the plates were tagged within our Radan sheet metal CAD/CAM software to have 0.1mm corners so that the components wouldn’t fall out of the sheet during punching but could easily be removed once the components had been completely punched.
CNC punched earth symbol
You can see that this electrical earth symbol has been cut through the protective plastic peelable film and right into the aluminium surface by the top tool. The die used is a simple flat plate with no features. The symbols can be the other way around so that we can punch in symbols on either or even both sides of the plate at the same time within the CNC punching cycle. Once the plastic has been peeled off and the plate anodised the earth symbol is clearly visible and cannot be removed like a stick on label. This technique will save the customer time in production and costs, we can punch in an earth symbol in under 0.5 seconds so it’s virtually free compared to sticking on an earth symbol label. Other forms can be stamped in e.g. a company logo, product name, numbers and letter, the choice is yours.