TABLE OF CONTENTS Metal stamping and sheet-metal production are constantly growing technologies. True, there have been tendencies to replace many metal parts with plastics, since the cost of dies is sometimes considered too high. (As if the cost of molds were lower!) However, these tendencies will probably be somewhat balanced in the future, when manufacturers will finally realize-by adding up numbers on paper-that plastics cannot always replace sheet metal nor may sheet metal always replace plastics.
Everything has its own sphere of usage and application. Plastics are great materials, yielding, permissive but easily deteriorating, changing colors, crumbling away under the effect of either sun and weather or time. Sheet metal, once a part is made of it, remains stable without being affected by time, environment, an operator, or anything at all, with the exception of hammers and corrosives and extreme heat, of course.
A great advance in sheet-metal work was accomplished by implementing numerically controlled machinery like automatic drill presses, automatic punch presses, and lathes. These manufacturing tools are real workhorses, hurling out products of superior quality and continuity. Naturally, this is true only if the programs they run on are of an equivalent quality.
The discovery of EDM machinery was another step forward, as these machines, quite unheard of several years ago, quietly and efficiently produce parts previously considered impossible to make. Additional new technologies emerge on the market continuously, many of them quite beneficial to the manufacturing field, many still controversial. Lasers, plasma technology, electroerosion, chemical...
