Choosing the right hydraulic press

The first essential step in ensuring you get the right custom hydraulic press for your business is to determine what your manufacturing process is or will be. When considering the hydraulic parts you produce, trust an experienced MULTIPRESS sales applications engineer to help you determine the custom press features your operation will require. Depending on the specific functions your customized application entails, items such as these maybe considered:

Total tonnage required – this is important for certain applications, but not a sole factor to consider. Minimum tonnage needed should also be considered. It is typically 20% of the maximum tonnage.
Electronically adjustable force or pressure – If you have a variety of parts with different force needs, you may consider electronic control of tonnage force. This will allow your force requirement to be stored and recalled next time you run that part.
Maintain tonnage and dwell – Many custom applications, such as piercing, the press ram returns immediately after finishing the press stroke. Other times, once the press force is reached, the ram must stay in the closed position and continue to apply tonnage. This allows metal parts to flow to the new shape or bonded parts to join completely.
Versatility – does your process change? Some custom hydraulic presses allow for more versatile production and this can be a determining factor in the process of choosing the right press for your customized application.

How will you feed parts to your custom hydraulic press?

This will help you determine what type of custom hydraulic press you will need. Consider whether parts:

• Will be hand fed in and removed out from the front of the press?
• Will parts need to flow through the press from side to side? Or front to back?
• Will the parts be progressively formed in various processes on multiple presses?
• How important is parallelism when making part?

What are your material handling needs?

By understanding how your materials will be fed into and removed from your customized machine, a MULTIPRESS sales application engineer can help ensure you have the right features designed and built into your press to facilitate a smooth production process. There is an array of auxiliary options available, depending on your production requirements, such as:

• Robotics
• Ejectors
• Index tables – increase the speed of your process. This feature enables the ability to load a part while making a part.
• Conveyors
• Pick & place units
• Press to press transfer
• Shuttle tables (either manual or powered)
• Chutes

What Accessories will you need?

• Quick die change/ die lifters/ die clamps
• IOC technology to report diagnostics in real time
• Added safety features

There are many factors that go into determining the correct type of custom hydraulic press needed for your application. While an experienced sales application engineer should help guide you through this process, you can get a jump start by answering the above questions. Have a hydraulic or servo hydraulic press project in mind? Contact the experts at MULTIPRESS today! Our seasoned experts will help guide you through the process of designing your customized hydraulic or servo-hydraulic press.