3 Signs of a Great Wire EDM Shop
For over a decade, the United Centerless Grinding & Thread Rolling team has used wire EDM technology to make countless parts for medical, aerospace, and other highly regulated industries. As a nationwide wire EDM provider for many US manufacturers, we’re often surprised to hear about a new customer’s previous bad experience with a different wire EDM shop.
We want you to get great results, whether you work with us or choose another manufacturing partner for your wire EDM services. To help you find the right shop for your project, we’ve outlined three signs of a great wire EDM shop. Use these tips, and we’re confident you’ll cut costs, save time, and get top-quality parts!
Wire EDM Services for Complex Parts
Before diving in, here’s a quick refresher on the wire EDM process and why you may choose it over (or add it to) other precision machining processes.
Wire EDM (electrical discharge machining) is an electrothermal machining process that uses deionized water and a thin metal wire which acts as a tool electrode. A powerful electrical discharge sparks between the wire and the workpiece, precisely cutting through even the hardest conductive materials. Non-conductive dielectric fluid prohibits the spark from shorting out while simultaneously removing the waste material.
Choose wire EDM when machining parts with a high hardness, complex geometries, tight tolerances, and material stress limitations.
How to Vet a Shop for Wire EDM Services
Begin by having a conversation with the shop you’re considering for wire EDM services. A quality shop should check each of these boxes:
1. They use appropriate workholding and fixturing
To accurately achieve all of your part’s designed features, a wire EDM shop will need to use the right workholding and fixturing solutions.
Typical workholding implements, such as vises secured via T-slots, modular plates, 4th axis methods, or other solutions, may work perfectly for your part. More often than not, however, your wire EDM partner will need to build a custom solution, so make sure the shop is equipped to create custom fixturing if necessary.
The right workholding and fixturing should also provide adequate slug control. As metal slugs fall away from your part during wire EDM, they must not hit any nearby conductive material that hasn’t already been drenched in deionized water. If they do, the entire setup could short out, which could throw your project timeline off track.
Be sure your wire EDM services partner is prepared with the necessary workholding or fixturing and has slug controls in place.
2. They look for and understand true position callouts
Did your engineer include a true position callout on their design? If so, make sure that your wire EDM provider is equipped to program multiple setups from a single datum.
In case you need a refresher, “true position” is a GD&T specification that defines the part feature against which all other part features should be measured.
If your part requires multiple setups, its true position callout is the only means by which a shop can ensure accuracy and consistency across all of the part’s features. For example, if United Centerless Grinding & Thread Rolling cuts half of a circle and then moves the part before performing the rest of the cut, we will rely on your true position callout to ensure perfect alignment of both cuts.
To provide premium wire EDM services and a top-quality product, your shop must have the ability to control for all relevant locations, measurement features, and datum features.
At United Centerless Grinding & Thread Rolling, we can help you optimize your design to include a true position callout. Just ask!
3. They solve problems creatively and cost-effectively
Wire EDM is often the only viable manufacturing solution for brittle materials or extremely thin parts. When faced with high-volume projects that require precision without physical pressure, your manufacturing partner may opt to stack the work material in flat layers and cut multiple parts at a time.
United Centerless Grinding & Thread Rolling recently implemented this technique when making parts out of a material that was only 0.016” thin. Because wire EDM is performed on submerged material, that material must hold a level of rigidity, or else it will flop around in the deionized water.
The 0.016” material was too thin to cut by itself, so we sandwiched it between two 1/8” plates and cut the stack of materials.
Now let’s talk about cost efficiency. The total cost for this particular job was $1,300, with the vast majority of that cost covering setup and machining time. Another shop may have taken advantage of the opportunity to charge $1,300 per part. However, because we were able to stack and cut all three of their ordered parts at one time, we invoiced them appropriately for $1,300 total.
By adapting our machining process to ensure high-precision parts and approaching the job smartly and ethically, we gave our customers great parts at a great price.
You should expect this same level of care from any shop that provides you with wire EDM services.
Get Wire EDM Services from the Experts
With wire EDM, we can cut and contour any conductive material, including alloys, superalloys, steel, aluminum, brass, bronze, copper, carbon graphite, carbon steel, stainless steel, and titanium.
Contact us for a quote or to discuss your next project!
