Manufacturing Profile: Insert Sleeve Stamping

CAR Engineering and Manufacturing, manufactured these stamped aluminum sleeves for a tier one automotive supplier. The customer was procuring these parts overseas, the previous manufacturing process involved making large buys of sawed aluminum tubing and cutting to length. Advantage CAR: Our engineers inquired if the end user could live with a seam in the part. Since the part is inserted into a radiator to provide additional strength and not visible to the end customer, the seam was fine in terms of fit, form, and function. CAR was able to form these sleeves in our multi slide machine out of aluminum flat coil versus sawed aluminum tubing. CAR’s material choice is much more cost effective than sawed aluminum tubing and we were able to offer a piece price that was roughly half of what they were paying previously. The tier-one automotive supplier also enjoys shorter lead times and smaller minimum order quantities with the CAR part.

Our experienced team designed and manufactured progressive stamping tooling for this insert sleeve project. The 58.0 mm diameter sleeve was manufactured using 5052 aluminum coil. CAR started with one sleeve and the project was so successful that CAR now manufactures 5 different versions of this sleeve ranging from 44MM to 58 MM in diameter. CAR has one progressive die for this family of parts- each of the 5 parts has different interchangeable components which produce the specific sleeve required by the end user. CAR is able to switch from sleeve to sleeve in about 45 minutes allowing for reduced set-up times and further cost savings.