EXTRUSION TOOLING REPAIR AT LASER ADDITIVE SOLUTIONS LTD

Estimated reading time 2 minutes

Doncaster-based Laser Additive Solutions, a company which provides advanced laser based Additive Manufacturing (AM) services across the whole breadth of engineering sectors, has completed its latest repair of a PVCu extrusion tool set.

The tooling belongs to a leading UK plastic extrusion manufacturer who have been using Laser Additive Solutions since 2015 to repair high value tooling components that have worn or been damaged. Peter Brown, the owner of Laser Additive Solutions, has invested heavily in the latest Laser Metal Deposition technology to provide a highly capable and flexible AM solution configured in a special processing cell.

The Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) process is a fully automated metal repair process that utilises a highly accurate laser, a CNC-manipulation system and metal powder to rebuild missing sections on high value engineering components.

A wide range of materials such as stainless steels, tool steels, and high speed steels can be deposited, including SS316, H13, M2 and Stellite-6. The process inputs the minimal heat required to achieve successful fusion of the powdered material, resulting in a fine grained microstructure.

Many of our customers previously used manual laser welder sub-contractors but the highly automated LMD process is several times quicker (we have been completed jobs in 5 hours that were quoted as 25 hours by manual laser welders). In addition, the automated nature of the process means the repairs are of the highest possible quality (Peter has previously developed and productionised LMD repair applications for Rolls-Royce and Siemens gas turbine components).