John Quitter, Engineering Manager General Die Caster accepting award
General Die Casters is the winner of the 2024 North American Die Casting Association’s International Casting Design Competition in the < 1lbs category. John Quitter, Engineering Manager and Tim Tennant, Director of Business Development received the award this week.
The castings are produced for Flex N Gate. The assembly of 3 castings form the latch for the Silverado EV mid gate assembly. They were initially produced as plastic injection moldings, but the parts failed to hold the rear glass during crash testing.
Silverado EV – Flex N Gate
The customer implemented a stop gap measure making the parts from investment cast aluminum until a cost-effective solution was sourced.
We received the quote package and immediately began working with this new potential customer on the designs. We quickly gained their confidence as we recognized features such as draft and irregular parting lines on the model that were problematic for die castings and the function of their assembly.
The parts are deceivingly complex. They are machined for hinge pin alignment and the interfaces between the parts are crucial as they slide together. Parting lines had to work around these areas. Slide parting lines are irregular and result in thin die steel conditions which are difficult to spray and must be kept flash free. The slide shut offs also made venting very challenging.
Our engineering teams worked together to redesign the castings for manufacturability and ensure all the components would mate and function as required.
We constructed single cavity unit dies to verify the new design as well as bridge the production needs until multi-cavity dies could be created.
Working on a very tight timeline we redeveloped the part design, constructed bridge tooling to allow the customer to control costs while building and launching production tooling to meet all vehicle production requirements.
Another example of General Die Caster’s expert team successfully launching a challenging project in record time for a customer in need.
Do you have additional questions or need more detail? Contact General Die Casters today!
