When I was over at straitline they wouldn't let me take a picture of this but I see Greg posted it up and so I'm stealing it from the Straitline blog. If your a production geek like me then you'll find this cool. BTW I went over to see our forging company a couple days ago... again cameras were off limits but I really wanted to show you the giant presses that were squishing aluminum.
The reason it was off limits is they also do military stuff and you know how those guys get when your selling stuff to the enemy.
What i really wanted to show you was the EDM. Basically to get a forged part you take a hunk of aluminum and squish it under pressure to the desired shape. The desired shape comes from the mold which is two big hunks of steel that are the female part, top and bottom, of what you're trying to make.
The cool part is how they create the mold. First they make a copper "male" part. They run current through it over a giant block of steel and basically the Arc starts to wear away the steel. It may take days to finally get the final mold as the copper is slowly pushed deaper as the cavity gets dug out by electricity. It looks something like a spark plug arcing but imagine a giant spark plug. Anyway I'll keep bugging them... maybe eventually I can get a pic or video!!!
In the meantime here is pedals in process at straitline.
http://straitline.blogspot.com/2008/11/happy-thanksgiving-to-all-yankees.html
Greg i think beer can turkey was invented in a Nascar parking lot so I don't think we can claim it as ours. Cheers to our friends to the south!!! hope you have a good one.
