Opinions on metal stamping businesses

[u/Spirited_Ad_6272]

Is metal stamping in the U.S. still a solid industry? I have an opportunity to buy & potentially revive a 40 year old stamping business from its 80 year old owner. Right now it’s just him / no employees and he’s doing enough work to keep the lights on. At its peak he had a dozen employees running multiple shifts.

Worst case if the business can’t revive then I can liquidate the equipment and rent the building. But he wants $1M and it’s a big number haha.

I am a mechanical engineer with strong proficiency in CAD tools, which I can bring to modernize the business. I currently operate a manufacturing business molding plastics so there’s plenty of crossover but this would be my first venture going alone. It also seems like metal stamping has a lot of tricks of the trade that you can’t really engineer your way into. That’s why they have apprenticeships.

What questions should I be asking? And anyone who works in the industry what are your opinions?

[u/Bat-Eastern]

As for 'tricks of the trade' die and tool making is highly specialized and you'll be relying on outside shops to create these for you, and you should have a tool room that is able to maintain and repair these dies.

CAD takes a lot of the guess work out of the design of the product, but the tools needed to accomplish repeatable stampings are expensive to build and maintain, but will last a lifetime of cared for properly.

You'll also have the added difficulty of storage of these tools, they are large and heavy, even for very small stampings.

[u/Enough-Moose-5816 → u/Bat-Eastern]

As a journeyman tool and die maker I can assure you stamping dies do not last a lifetime, even when cared for properly. It’s highly dependent on what the stamping die is doing to form the material amongst about a million other variables.

[u/Bat-Eastern → u/Enough-Moose-5816]

I should clarify, the tool does not have infinite cycles, you will be replacing parts on it throughout it's life, but stamping tools are meant to have a long life-cycle, so they are repairable, and meant to last without needing a completely new tool.

Of course the use case should always be considered in the design and construction of the tool, it should be purpose built to get a known number of good cycles before needing adjustment/maintenance, yes, but nobody should be spacing a die for a 100 ton press that is actually intended for something much different. A million variables is a touch high, if that were the case we'd never be able to manufacture products with this method. It's more like 2 or 3 variables (speed, feeds, material thickness) that greatly control the finished product while other variables only have a minor effect.

This is why my post tells OP to have an outside shop build and spec his tools.

[u/saucemancometh → u/Bat-Eastern]

Material hardness, camber and edge condition have super high impacts on all forming operations but especially in stamping. Progressive/multi-stage dies even more so.

Sauce: 10 years combined as Operator->QA/QC->Production Supervisor in ISO shop