double sided fsw and isf

[freddi]

Thank you guys. I appreciate the time and effort you have put into this very useful reply.

Thanks Nick for the video, very useful. And yes, I understand that a real machine that was capable of that would have a value of at least 200 grand or so, we just want to create a prototype to prove that it is possible, it will obviously most likely not work and we don't have that kind of budget or resources.

The material that we are friction stir welding is a 6mm thick lead sheet as our customer has put this as a requirement but as it is proof of concept he is also happy for us to use plastics but he should prefer Lead sheets to be stirred.

One current design issue we are having is that we are struggling to create a good axis design to deal with the high radial and axial loads, we were thinking of using hardened steel rollers with large leadscrews, we want to do it as cheaply as possible but still be able to meet the high force requirement, any ideas on this considering there is the 2 z axis (up and down) and then other separate motors to power the machine?

We have an idea of the rigid frame, it has already been modelled and we know roughly the motors/spindle we will use.

I appreciate your time reading this message. Thank you.

[Boyan Silyavski]

Why then you just scale things down and demonstrate that with ~0.5mm -1mm sheet? That will greatly simplify things. For example then you could use normal 16xx screw from China, 3nm nema 23 motors, cheap drives for the motors, even unsupported 20-35 mm shafts instead of expensive linear supported rails. It will be better if you use instead of ball bearing blocks, blocks that a plane, with special plastic or ceramic elements.

I will greatly recommend you reading this below. Ignore the acoustic and music stuff. There is quite extensive info on metal sheet forming. Look at the machine on page 55 in document / p. 73/ Figure 3.2: Mini-pan production process . There you could see the machine i am talking about. Just do that both sided.

Soren E Maloney 2010 PhD thesis.pdf - University of Cambridge


What i mean is: you can do it with that money.

The only thing left is to choose the cheap controller that can control all this. It must be Pokeys CNC 57 which on paper ideally could do that, though i had some problems with it, may be because of interferences in my machine. The other controller that could do that maybe
http://cncdrive.com/products.html

Anyway, i am not sure in real life if you will not have to use some hydraulic instead of ball screw for pushing. Or a combination of these.