Using Tribofinishing to Round off Tiny Corners for Egide
One of our long-time clients, a glass-to-metal seal specialist in the field of micro connectors, regularly asks us to produce tiny metal pins for them. What makes these pieces stand out is that they are only 3 mm long and 0.3 mm in diameter with ends that must be rounded into a perfect hemisphere shape.
The technical challenge lies in how difficult it is to guarantee this level of precision on such minuscule parts with a process that is inexpensive for the client. To grasp just how tiny these pieces are, imagine that 1000 of them weigh at most 2 grams, fitting easily into the palm of your hand.
Bar-turning would seem the simple and obvious answer, but ultimately an unsatisfactory one as it would have been more expensive than the solution put forward by Delta Neo. As a technical alternative to bar-turning, we developed a tribofinishing process that effectively utilises our different types of tumbling equipment.
We have a considerable number of machines available, offering various tribofinishing techniques (centrifuging, circular or linear vibration, etc.) that enable us to achieve a precision down to a few microns.
Thus created, the process enables us to round off the ends of these parts while complying with a mean final diameter tolerance of +/-0.01 mm.
By leveraging Delta Neo’s extensive portfolio of technical expertise and by ramping up this industrial feat, we have successfully fulfilled our client’s strict requirements. We have now been using this method for several years to produce these types of parts.