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Ford's New Freeform Fabrication Technology Produces Metal Stamped Parts--Without Any Stamping or Dies!

By Rain Noe - July 8, 2013

in Materials | Tech

Metal stamping is the quickest, most efficient way to bang millions of parts out of sheet metal. It also requires expensive dies and a big-ass press to sandwich and stamp the metal. This means that if an auto designer wants to evaluate, say, a radical new fender design, they've got to dig into the budget for new dies and wait weeks or months for those dies to be manufactured.

Unless, that is, they work for Ford. The Dearborn-based auto giant has commissioned a new type of rapid prototyping, which they're calling F3T (Ford Freeform Fabrication Technology). With F3T the sheet metal is suspended in space and lubricated while robot arms, one above and one mirrored below, simultaneously press and yield at their extremities to manipulate the sheet. This obviates the need for dies and can crank a new part out in just hours. Check it out:

Wicked, no? It's obviously not a production solution, but will clearly be a huge boon to designers, who no longer need to wait for new dies to be cut during the design phase. And while the three-axis nature of the arms means you still can't do crazy things like undercuts, it's hard not to be impressed by the complexity of the shapes that F3T is able to achieve.

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J.Eriksson

11 years ago

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Those arms are called Hexapods or Stewart platforms and they have 6-degrees of freedom, not just 3 like their Delta robot cousins.
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Sharad

11 years ago

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There must be a limitation of sheet metal thickness this can handle. Is there a similar process for thicker sheets?
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Vimal

11 years ago

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Link to the work Matthew is referring to: http://amarkalo.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/practicum-robotic-incremental-sheet.html
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Vimal

11 years ago

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Very cool. So is sufficient pressure at the robot's extremities all that's needed to allow this shaping?
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Peter Harris

11 years ago

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Try Googling "Incremental Forming"....
....this is not new ...Honda was playing with this in about 2005 - it just looks like Ford probably has now spent more $$ on it than anyone else to date....and then got their Marketing Department on board.. :-)
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Matthew Jensen

11 years ago

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It exists in at least two places: As a final design project two students at the University of Michigan in the Master of Science in Industial design used two Kuka robots to do this exact same metal fabricating process.
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Ken J

11 years ago

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Boy would I like to get my hands on that software!
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