Fabricating For Dummies

Chapter 9

Tooling Up

IN THIS CHAPTER

Reviewing metallurgy

Setting standards

Punching hard or hardly punching

Staying sharp (and clean)

Coating combobulation

A tool is usually more simple than a machine; it is generally used with the hand, whilst a machine is frequently moved by animal or steam power.

— CHARLES BABBAGE

Like hammers to carpenters, wrenches to mechanics, cell phones to real estate agents, everyone needs tools. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a sheet-metal manufacturing company. It’s here that forming tools, bending tools, cutting tools, and their associated toolholders are mounted on machine tools, then used to produce precision parts. As with early humans using their opposable thumbs to produce the first weapons and pottery, followed by farming implements and works of art, manufacturing is and always has been the epitome of tool use, wherever or however it’s done.

Throughout the chapters in Part 2, I talk about the “tools of the trade,” so to speak, what I like ...