Case Study

Customer: Tier II Automotive Supplier

Challenge: Marmon Bead Development and Implementation

Explanation:

In 2008 Overton Carbide began working on the tooling and development of a marmon bead spun into a 4.75" diameter tube. This process was started after seeing a tube assembly at the customer's plant with a large machined and welded on stainless steel flange. Knowing this was a very expensive way to produce parts and seeing some opportunity for Overton we decided to take on the task of trying to eliminate the machined flange and the welding process from the product. We knew that if we could make this work it would significantly reduce the cost in each assembly.

Solution:

Over the previous year Overton had designed and built a new and larger spin form machine that would handle this diameter up to 16" maximum diameter. It worked well for the development of this marmon bead project. Early into the development we experienced problems with the material splitting due to the shape and amount of the expansion required to make the flange. Our initial tooling would not work. As we tried to form the tube, the internal arbor would cut completely through the tube wall. We redesigned and modified the tooling. Parts were saved and re-used and part of the tooling had to be made again. Eventually we were able to make the flange but it required 3 hits. Knowing that would not be good enough for production we re-designed and went at it again. We were able to go from 3 hits to 2 but felt that would still not be good enough to sell as a production process. We worked with both and trying to find a material that would be more forgiving and allow the material to flow as we needed. We finally concluded that stainless steel would be the best way to go. With the new material and additional tooling modifications we were able to make the bead with one hit on the spin form machine. We were convinced that we could provide a reliable marmon bead with one machine cycle. At that point we approached customer's engineers with the proposal of incorporating this design on the tube assembly. They were very interested and offered a lot of help the design modifications, prototype material, formed tubes to run and tolerance concerns to us. In mid-2008 the formed marmon bead was quoted and released. The part is currently still in production.