Designing pre-forming dies for drop forging by using the model-material technique

In the drop-forging process, the amounts of flash and die wear can be decreased by pre-forming the billet, and controlling the material flow can also eliminate forging defects. In the present work, pre-forming tooling for some long forgins has been studied, using model-material experiments. Pre-forming can decrease the amount of flash metal by about 20–40% in the final drop-forging operation and, consequently, the tool wear decreases considerably. Comparison of the results of the model-material experiments with the practical drop-forging of steel shows the model-material technique to be a very useful method for simulating metal-working processes.