Laminated steel tooling in the aerospace industry

The intention of this paper is to describe some of the activities undertaken by the Warwick Manufacturing Group towards an EPSRC/Industrially funded research programme called LASTFORM. The aim of the programme is to produce LArge Scale Tooling FOr Rapid Manufacture, predominantly in the Aerospace industry. At Warwick the method adopted was to LASER cut metal laminations to correspond to slices taken from a CAD model. The laminates were then joined to provide a near net shape of the required tool. Warwick’s main contribution to the programme was to investigate the various ways of joining these laminations together so as to withstand the production environment. The outline methodology is described and includes material selection, test procedures and the manufacture of simple and more complex tools. The paper concludes that LASTFORM tooling is suitable for a number of different processes at both low and high temperatures. Cost savings, lead time reductions and opportunities to add value to the tools is demonstrated.