When the customer tossed a couple of crudely made, sand-cast aluminum, Mexican lime squeezers on the bench, and said, "I wanna mass produce these by aluminum die-casting. Can you build me a die-set?" we said, "Sure. We can do that." And the rest became history. You may read a historical account of this project here:
Lemon and Lime Squeezers: The Untold Story
The customer provided several concept models, which were rather crudely made sand castings from Mexico.
SKS Die Casting in Alameda, California was selected as the provider for production. SKS provided the mold base, and we designed and built the die inserts.
The Design
We began the product design using TriSpectives, which later became IronCAD. The shapes comprised basically a hemisphere for the bowl sections and a B-spline lofted handle. The software was able to smoothly blend all the shapes with beautiful fillets of constant or variable radii. The top of the bowl on the upper half was truncated with an elliptical subtractor, then the edges were blended.
Once the design was finished, stereo lithography prototypes were purchased from 3D Systems of Santa Clarita, California.
Tool Fabrication
Once the design was frozen design of the cavities and cores of the tool commenced. At that time we had no CNC CAM software, so we enlisted the help of Mr. Don "Zack" Zacher of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, to generate the G-code files for machining the mold blocks and EDM electrodes. He delivered SURFCAM-generated CAM files, and machining of cavities, cores, and EDM electrodes was accomplished on our Maho MH-700C 4-axis milling center.
Total machining time was on the order of 100 to 200 hours.
Total EDM time was similar.
The cavities were cut from H-13 hotwork die steel. The parting surfaces were match-EDMed, steel-on-steel, for a good fit.
