Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Pressing metal (updated)

Bert send me this cool animated GIF of a machine making chains. Lovely, simple, very effective.



I am always amazed at how they can just press metal into shape. Apple today showed a video of the making of the upcoming new Mac Pro. If you like technology, the keynote presentation is worth it just for that. It starts with a big circular chunk of aluminium being put into a shaped hole. Then a shaped thing comes from above, and in a second simply presses the chunk into the cylinder it needs to be. Holy moly, what force!
It's a short video, starting at about 37 minutes into the keynote.




Update: 
... And that's just the relatively soft aluminium, they can also do it with steel:



The force applied is 800 tons, about two fully loaded jumbo jets!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

(Some kind of error going on w/that second one)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Durnit, it may be a region (country) limitation, because it works fine for me. (I'm in UK, and I think it's a UK production.)

TC [Girl] said...

Fascinating vids; thanks for sharing! Robotics are quite fascinating to watch...and to think of how detailed all their task programs must have to be; AMAZING!!

Quite the process to make these cylinders, as well...