Top 6 Hydroforming Advantages

President and CEO of Jones Metal, Dan Erb, takes a deep dive into six big benefits you didn't know about hydroforming. Watch the video on YouTube:


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Video Transcript:
"Looking at hydroforming from a macro point of view, there are about 3-5 hydroformers that are at the upper end of the spectrum. People that can-do world-class projects, very difficult parts. We’re in that group. It’s not bragging. We’ve been in projects where they actually hired 4 people to try to make a part, and we’re the only one who was able to be successful.

Pre-polishing

Hydroforming gives you a lot of unique advantages that other forming methods don’t have.

We can for example, we can pre-polish the blank, coat it with plastic, form it up with the plastic covering the polish and leaving that shiny surface. So we can peel off the plastic after it’s formed and you get a nice, not 100% polished part, you’ll have to touch it up, but It gets you about 90% there.

We have a rubber diaphragm pushing oil that protects the top side of the part.

So it’s pushing down while the punch drives up, so you’re not getting that metal-on-metal grinding. If you look at a stamping part, you’ll see scratch marks going down the side. For some basic commercial products, that’s okay. If you’re making a part for, say a lawn mower, that’s okay, but if you’re making something that has to be visually attractive, having that rubber on the outside during the forming process gives you a much nicer finish.

Variable Thickness

We can form variable thickness of material.

We actually machined this in the flat. We took a piece of stainless that was this thick, a plate all the way out, and we machined this thickness so that we could form this up.

So if you look at the inside, the ID is the shape of the tool, but the OD, the outside, is the machined metal. Our press doesn’t care if there is variable thickness, thicker in the corners, thinner on the sides… our press doesn’t care if there is variable thickness in the material. Stamping can’t do that.

Negative Angles

With hydroforming, we would do an initial form where this goes straight up, this comes out, this is the flange, but then the hydroform can, with pressure, form this back at a negative angle. You can’t do that with stamping.

So with the same tool, we can form this up, and then wrap this around, so you get this negative angle. Stamping would probably have to form the part straight up and down and that’s a pretty massive tool.

Short Forming

This is another interesting advantage that we have in hydroforming… we can combine (with one tool) we can combine heat treating into the process. Especially on aluminum, when you’re heat treating aluminum it causes it to move, so when we form this up, we will short form it, not to the final height. We’ll heat treat it in our NADCAP heat treating facility, and then come back and restrike it. That restriking it causes the material to stretch just a little bit, locking in the shape for the final specifications of the customer.

Tooling Cost

I want to show you the difference between stamping and hydroforming as far as tooling cost. In stamping you have plates, posts, and springs. There's a lot of activity going on and a lot of cost in building die sets to fit inside the plates. With hydroforming we have a ring and a punch. Here's a good example of hydroform tools. You have the punch that's the shape of the part. This will be the ID of the part. Then you have a ring the punch fits inside of. There’s a hole in the middle of the ring that’s the shape of the punch.

When it's in a press the punch is lowered to the level of the ring and material is placed on the ring. The punch drives up while the bladder pushes down on the part. We only have a ring and a punch vs the stamping die that has all the other expense of the plates and the posts.

This type of work we call it form block work. You’re basically taking a form block made out of aluminum. It has a couple of locators in the center of the part. The pressure of the hydroform bends it over.

You wouldn’t press break this is because there might be a joggle in the part that causes a different shape you can’t do that on a press break, but

The cost of the tool is very minimal to where stamping would have to build the whole die to do this. SO whenever you’re doing a form block, hydroforming is a huge advantage.

Plastic Tooling

So to take this one step further… on the fluid cell press, we can actually make the tooling out of plastic which has a lot of advantages. This machine’s like butter, but one really cool thing is once you start to lubricate it, it soaks up the lubrication and allows the material to flow a lot better and the plastic lasts surprisingly long so this is a great option, especially when you’re looking at low volume type projects.

Bringing it Together

Hopefully you found this deeper dive into hydroforming interesting, hopefully you learned something you can apply to your product. But if there are further questions that you have, leave comments for us, email us, call us, we would love to talk about your situation and get deeper into the questions you have.

Even getting our engineering groups together and discussing. Everybody’s situation is a little different. Everyone has special circumstances. That’s kind of what separates us from other hydroformers. So thanks for watching… we really appreciate your view."