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M A Series III Clicker
In the later part of 1993 while working with some of our "smaller business" press die clients, a problem arose; one that in fact had been festering for some years. Historically, by 1993 we had been making press knives for about 20 years and every so often a client would come along, wishing they had some way to use clicker dies in their home or in a small business situation. For most of these clients the $7000 (at that time) to buy a hydraulic press was just not an option. Anyhow back to late 1993 we sat down and decided that there must be a way to make a small inexpensive clicker - not to rival the hydraulic press in any way - simply to enable the small home or business operator to use small clicker dies. The first fully fabricated steel model was finished early the following year, and although it did work somewhat, it had no real possibility of ever being a genuine working machine. We spent quite some time looking at its problems, and we then produced a second working model, with sizes revised and weaknesses somewhat reduced. For price and the amount of power we believed it would have, a 1/6th standard cutting board size (slightly larger than a sheet of 'A4' paper) was decided upon. All the figures appeared to estimate a peak cutting force of 1.5 to 2 tons would be possible (we now find that the somewhat 'beefed up' latest model using hi-tech Glacier bearings is in fact able to achieve about double this cutting force).
A great deal of time and effort was used in chasing up just who could do what to help us make this machine. As it happens, an old engineer friend helped to make the first set of wooden patterns (to cast the metal work). Our nephew Mike had a larger machine tool shop and so he also was willing to help with the final machining, once we had the metal cast into rough shapes. We had the first three sets of machine components cast, and Mike set to work on machining the larger parts to specification.
Surprisingly there are quite a lot of other metal parts to this machine, and we set about making or buying these parts and machining the smaller parts, at our Camira workshop. Assembley of theses first machines was not without problems, but we learnt a lot and also now had three working machines.
Now we move to September 1994. Within a few weeks we had two machines in the field working and one machine on our display bench, doing all sorts of things, from cutting rubber inserts for the dies to pressing in machine bearings - we were determine to work this machine hard.
We ordered another three cast sets, and made a further three machines, which were again sold; we repeated this one more time, which meant there were now eight machines in the field and still our one on the bench.
All was well for a couple of months and as we were about to order more, the unthinkable happened - a broken machine. We quickly collected the machine, and replaced it with the one on our workbench. Now the question: what went wrong? Well technically not a lot; it turned out that we had forgotten to apply one of those human rules: 'It cuts this - I wonder if it will cut that' turned out that this guy had been cutting larger and harder things than we ever intended the machine to work on.
So knowing how humans push the boundaries, we decided to up the anti and make all new professional patterns, and while we were at it to add more metal in places where there was any possibility of weakness, also it was decided a slightly larger cutting head would be a good thing.
We could at this point have made the head the full size of the bottom plate, and for some applications this would have been usefull, but knowing what had happened to our first machine we figured that in no time with a full size head we would have a lot of over-worked machines and complaints about what they expected to cut and couldn't. So the current size cutting head is a very good balance: you can cut almost anything that fits under the head, but you can also take larger items and step cut without overloading the machine. To be Continued---- |