The Press that thinks it's Mechanical

The Press that thinks its mechanical!

Joseph Rhodes worked closely with Chasestead Limited to design and build an 800 Tonne Adaptive Motion Hydraulic Press, which precisely mimics the pressing motion profile of conventional mechanical presses. The user friendly CNC system offers its user, for the first time, a press slide motion profile equivalent to either the sinusoidal curve of a simple crank/slider mechanism or modified harmonic of a link motion press. 

Application of the very latest electro/hydraulic technologies has enabled Joseph Rhodes to develop and build a hydraulic press that offers a truly ‘adaptive motion profile’ to the main slide – offering Chasestead Ltd total flexibility.

Chasestead approached Joseph Rhodes Limited to design and build a press, which would increase their productive capacity and capability and thus enable them to meet changing customer requirements. Having purchased a number of hydraulic presses from Joseph Rhodes in the past, Chasestead was confident that Rhodes could help take the Company forward.

Delivered and commissioned by Joseph Rhodes, Chasestead Ltd has experienced an improvement in productive capacity, a reduction in cost, and both an increase in sales and profit margins.

Chasestead are world renowned for the design and manufacture of prototype tooling for the manufacture of sheet metal parts and sub-assemblies for the next generation of vehicles. Many of their prototype assemblies end up crushed and crumpled as a result of crash tests which provide valuable engineering and safety data to automotive designers and developers alike.

Vehicle designers are constantly seeking lighter, stronger, recyclable materials for new vehicles in order to fulfil corporate responsibilities set out by the Government. These new materials challenge the skills of prototype-tooling manufacturers since their “formability” differs from that of steel. Chasestead’s answer to this challenge is to stay one step ahead of the competition by adopting a more flexible and responsive approach through investment in the latest technology.

Joseph Rhodes engineers were briefed to design a press which would enable Chasestead to work with these new materials and continue to provide its customers with a completely new Automotive Sub Assembly, from design, tool manufacture, testing and through to production, in less than six weeks. For comparison, when using conventional hard tooling the same process would take up to 40 weeks.

However a further complication was the fact that Chasestead customers predominantly use Mechanical Presses, and regularly request Chasestead to trial all newly developed tooling on a mechanical press.  Generally more expensive than their hydraulic counterparts, mechanical presses with a simple harmonic slide motion are usually only capable of forming products of consistent quality and in an efficient manner where the size, shape and flow characteristics of the material being processed remains the same, or remains very

similar to the product for which it was initially specified. Mechanical presses would therefore NOT give Chasestead the flexibility they required.  

The ‘Chasestead challenge’ was to develop a hydraulic press that was capable of pressing a variety of raw materials ranging from ‘highpress’ steel to deep drawing, high strength aluminium, yet could also mimic the motion profile of its mechanical counterpart. This would ensure that the developed tooling was ‘right first time’, particularly when forming in high strength aluminium which is now becoming the preferred choice for the automotive designer. The end result would be increased profits from a reduced time to market of prototype pressings and assemblies.

Recognised as experts in the development of both mechanical and hydraulic presses, Joseph Rhodes believed however that a special hydraulic press could be developed to offer the flexibility required. The Rhodes team therefore set about developing a flexible hydraulic press that would give the end user the option of generating a slide motion profile that simulated the mechanical press sinusoidal pressing profile.

The degree of innovation of this machine cannot be overstated since it generates total new flexibility over the normal, linear stop-start cycle of hydraulic presses, allowing the press to mimic a variety of motion profiles.

Developed, designed and built at the Joseph Rhodes Wakefield manufacturing facility, this press is the first of its kind, and has given Chasestead the ability to open up new markets by providing total pressing flexibility in a wide variety of materials.

This unique approach has provided Chasestead Ltd with the ability to benefit from being able to simulate the motion profiles different press designs.