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22 MoldMaking Technology May 2015 Case Study / Repair Laser welding complements other welding processes in the shop. Here, micro-TIG is employed to repair a damaged gripping mechanism. compared to a thou and a half (0.0015) with micro-TIG and five thou (0.005) with conventional TIG. He adds that laser is more viable when customers avoid heat-treating entirely, opting instead to finish-machine the mold and nitride it afterwards. "Nothing works perfectly on these jobs," Mourouzis says. "The material will start to pop and sputter, and you'll get pits, like the cross section of a Three Musketeers (candy) bar. But laser is usually much bet- ter than micro-TIG. You can go over it again and eliminate many of the voids, but if you try to do that with micro-TIG, you'll just make more holes." Configuration Matters Although all of Wicked Welding's laser equipment offers essentially the same essential advantages compared to micro- TIG, different systems are better-suited for different jobs. For Mourouzis and crew, this lesson was driven home early with their first laser purchase, the 1900 series LaserStar. Laser technology in general was far more expensive at the time, but in hindsight, that turned out to be a good thing. "I'm actually glad we couldn't afford a bigger system for our first purchase, because we'd have really missed out on some important benefits of having this smaller model," Mourouzis says. Chief among those benefits is speed. Particularly for smaller work, manipu- lating certain parts by hand can be easier and faster than using various combinations of jigs and fixtures to set them up for a larger, more automated system. At Wicked Welding, one com- mon example is core pin repair. "Say someone uses a sinker EDM to burn the top of a core pin, but the flush isn't very good. That'll create a little arc pit down in the bottom of the burn," Mourouzis explains. "Instead of having to do some kind of setup, we can just hold that pin in the laser, put the filler wire on there, zap it and be done. It lit- erally might be a few-minute process." Of course, that machine has its lim- its. For instance, the ability to create, say, a straight-line weld is dependent entirely on the skill of the operator. In contrast, precision is virtually built into HAIMER Power Clamp: Reliable shrinking – Fastest in the galaxy. Shrinking Technology Measuring Instruments Haimer USA, LLC | 134 E. Hill Street | Villa Park, IL 60181 | Phone: +1-630-833-1500 Email: haimer@haimer-usa.com | www.haimer-usa.com Tooling Technology Balancing Technology