General Geoff
Well-known member
Nothing inherent about it. Poorly heat treated MIM can be brittle and prone to breakage, just like poorly heat treated castings or forgings.
Malco Eagle Grip pliers
- Thread starter Kscardsfan
- Start date
tool_scrounge
Well-known member
Thanks for the reminder - I needed to get one each of the curved slim jaws versions.
Did Malco ever make a slim straight jaw Eagle Grip pliers?
neophyte
Well-known member
Metal Injection Molding is more likely to cause brittle breaky parts.
Older traditionally made pistols from forged and/or machined metals tended to be breaky because of poor metallurgical knowledge and production techniques of the time, and the inferior alloys available.
Even modern welding can have major issues, and welding isn’t exactly a new science.
Maybe someday MIM will get yo a point of being as good or superior to traditional metal fabrication techniques, but it is nowhere near there yet.
General Geoff
Well-known member
That time came 20 years ago. Modern metal injection molding is routinely used to fabricate parts for automotive, aerospace, medical and countless other industries. It is used on cost-is-no-object projects due to its advantages in uniformity of alloy vs traditional casting and when forming very complex shapes out of extremely difficult-to-machine hyper alloys. In fact some hyper alloys themselves require sintered powder metallurgy to be created at all.
It has disadvantages, mainly that the process results in minor material shrinkage beyond thermal contraction alone after the sintering process is complete, but this can be accounted-for when designing and building the tooling to generate a correctly sized final part.
MIM can be used as purely a cost-cutting measure, which when done will often result in an inferior part because the other variables (alloy quality, dimensional tolerances, design economy considerations) sabotage the end product before the metal is ever sintered. But the process itself is not inferior to casting/forging/machining, it is simply different.
RichieP_MechE
Well-known member
I wonder if they were making some of their other pliers in this facility. This lot of forge dies clearly shows a trimming die for one half of a pair tongue and groove pliers which Malco does sell.
Though the drop hammer section of the plant does appear to be extremely clean, and the lack of floors around the presses could mean maybe they were recently installed but not yet up and running before the plant was shut down.
The Luger is pretty much the gun for people who admire machining and such craftsmanship, they went to the extreme. I think that if you mix parts from different old lugers you get an unreliable firearm, the part tolerances were individually fitted for every manufactured handgun. Properly factory assembled luger with factory ammunition was a good and reliable but terribly expensive product. Nowadays with modern (recreational shooting) ammo, they are also known to be quite problematic.No friggin way you're machining a fully functioning, all steel Luger for $150, even scaled up to hundreds of thousands in production and even with 95% of the process fully automated with all up-front tooling costs paid-for.
American Locomotive
Well-known member
I'll admit that final assembly and finishing would likely drive the cost up past $150, however I'd be willing to put some money down that you could have most if not all of those components machined (including material purchasing costs ) for around $150. The vast majority of those components are small and can be mill-turned from round bar stock. That opens you up to using bar-bed automatic CNC machines, and depending on how much you spend on the machine, you can get them with 5, 6, 8 or even more spindles. You load a bunch of bars in, and the machine cranks away, delivering you part-after-part.
The company I worked for made a lot of revolver cylinders for various gun companies. Solid round bar stock went in one end of the machine, and a completed cylinder popped out of the other end every 45 seconds. We sold the completed cylinders to the manufacturers for about $5, meaning our cost was even less. Looking at the manufacturer's websites - those cylinders that cost us $3 to make, that we sold for $5, have a retail price of around $90-100 depending on the brand.
Toyota infamously could build the 1ZZ Corolla engine for $750 or so. In a modern Chrysler minivan, the seats cost more to manufacture than the entire powertrain - even including the axle shafts and wheel hubs.
It's disturbingly cheap to manufacture stuff.
SellersMachineCo
Well-known member
I found an answer to your questions while reading into all this. Those dies you show, and also the forging presses… came from Western Forge. If you look through the auction catalog from when Western Forge was sold off in 2020, the serial numbers for the forging presses match what is listed in the Malco auction. So it appears they bought up the Western Forge tooling, possibly with plans to start making the other types of pliers WF had been making? We may never know now.I wonder if they were making some of their other pliers in this facility. This lot of forge dies clearly shows a trimming die for one half of a pair tongue and groove pliers which Malco does sell.
Though the drop hammer section of the plant does appear to be extremely clean, and the lack of floors around the presses could mean maybe they were recently installed but not yet up and running before the plant was shut down.
In high quantities. Otherwise it's very expensive.
For a sense of this, ~15 years ago I worked on a gearbox design project, and small custom spur gears, 3-4" in diameter by less than an inch wide cost well over $1k each to make. At that time you could buy a new 5 speed manual Tacoma transmission from Toyota for ~$2k.
When you design custom parts, you appreciate how inexpensive a new car actually is.
Yup.
Typical for a high degree of toolimg, the first one costs $1,000,000, and every subsequent one costs $1. Choose how many you want to average it out on…