How I made steel toe crocs with wood

did you know you can form steel using wood it doesn't seem like it should work steel is stronger than wood right it's like rock paper scissors steel beats wood and wood beats rock well let's get real paper beating rock is some physically unrealistic garbage I'm getting a bit off-topic here I want to wear Crocs in my shop I'd really rather not be wagering my toes every time I do that so I tried to buy steel toed Crocs but they don't exist what come on Crocs incorporated this is a huge business opportunity in any case their oversight is my opportunity so I set out to make my own steel toed Crocs and not just a one-off I want to make a setup that will let me mass-produce them and it mostly worked so follow along as I show you how I pulled this off and why it's a surprisingly difficult problem this was actually one of the harder projects I've done lately I was really shocked at the number of iterations that this took to get working so before we can dive down into the nitty-gritty there's a bit of housekeeping I need to take care of a bunch of people keep asking you what's the deal with your face hey man you ugly or something you can ask there's a reason I haven't been showing my face and it's that people tell me I look really young for my age I'm just kidding the real reason I'm showing my face is just that I've been wanting to focus on the projects they are the star of the show I'm just the host but if it makes you feel better I can show my face we're not just let me know I don't care so I can't ignore the white elephant in the room which is this backboard they're getting tons and tons of questions so first things first I don't plan to mass-produce this I make hardware products for a living and the last thing I want to do with my free time is develop and sell cheap plastic novelties even if they are fun if there's enough demand maybe there's a way to get this out in the world but I'm not planning on making it myself right now so another big question I've been getting is if I plan to make a V 2 of this hoop and the answer is yes I'm already working on it I have parts coming in and the mission statement for it is all shots go in whether it's a line drive or a slow arcing shot I want them all to go in I'm pretty excited about this project it's definitely going to be a lot more complicated than this hoop this is really elegant as one piece this is gonna be a mess I promise but it is looking like it's going to be a tour de force of economical spot-welded sheet metal construction so I'm really excited about it third question does this account for spin no so the other question I've been asked a million times is what is the technique drawing app I use it's called concepts and if you do technical drawing for anything you should have this it is fantastic it's an infinite canvas where you can just let your ideas flow this is the only reason that I have an iPad and I'm not affiliated with them in any way just a happy customer it's really good oh and I almost forgot I'm loved in the comments it's really awesome having all these experts in different fields chiming in and giving me tips and I assume other people like reading them as well but I have tool and die makers giving me advice on my stupid plastic forming tools it's awesome I'm trying to reply to as many as I can it's getting hard but please keep them coming I love it it's fantastic thank you now on with the show so what I made is a tool that will let me take a piece of sheet metal and smash it into the shape of the Steel Toe cover for a crock so look I'm not a tolling expert by any means if I say something stupid you'll understand why it took me four or five generations to get this tool mostly working you're gonna laugh at my first attempt in retrospect it was stupid but I'm I don't know what I'm doing I'm going to show all of it I think that's where the interesting bits are anyway if you're wondering why I'm making the tool out of wood instead of say steel or aluminum the first reason is I want the challenge and the second reason is price go online and look at the price of a six by six by ten inch billet of aluminum I mean what does it look like I'm made of money let's make sure we're all on the same page here I have a crock and I want to make a steel cover for the toast that when a heavy thing falls on them my toes don't get obliterated and the way they don't wanna go out doing this I want to take a piece of flat sheet metal and force it into the shape that I want and the way that I plan to go about this is carving the shape that I want out of a block of wood and then carving the inverse of that shape out of another block of wood then putting a piece of sheet metal between them and then smash this down super hard and then hopefully the sheet metal will become that shape the challenge here is that metal really likes the shape that it is and if you try to force it into another shape it's gonna fight you tooth-and-nail imagine I'm looking at a steel bar from the side and I want to bend it into a shape like this so anyone who's been to steel bar before knows that it doesn't just Bend you have to force it the reason for this is that when you try to bend the steel this side actually has to get squashed down and this side has to get longer and it does not want to do that so you might be wondering how can still get squash isn't it and there's some caveats but it generally is I take a little piece of steel like this and I squish it down it actually gets wider the material does have to go somewhere so if I bend this it's actually getting fatter on this side and thinner on this side isn't that neat these same things apply when you're trying to form metal in 3d but it's much worse for example imagine I'm trying to take a sheet of steel and form a bowl shape into it I was looking at it from the side it might look like this if I just smash this shape into the piece of sheet metal this just like the bend this material has to come from somewhere either the metal has to stretch and get thinner which it really doesn't want to do or it needs to pull these sides in if the sheet metal is this size and then I try to stamp this sphere into it material pretty much has to come from the sides and if you think about it if I'm trying to pull all the sides in I'm basically saying I want to take this piece of sheet metal and scale it down kind of like this so newsflash sheet metal does not want to do this it will fight to the death it will squirm it will thrash wait until you see what I went through trying to get this to happen so imagine taking this piece of sheet metal and trying to force it down to be shorter it just bends just think about how much harder it is to compress this down than it is for it to Bend if it bends and compresses when you're trying to do this then you get all kinds of bends in your part which ruins the part so this is one of the key challenges for this project was finding a way to smash effectively a sphere into a piece of sheet metal shrinking the outside enough and getting few enough wrinkles and buckling and this that I don't ruin the part basically all the iteration that I did was around this idea so I want to make a tool that will let me super smash sheetmetal into the shape of a crock but to do that I need to know the shape of the crock how do I measure it I use calipers those don't really work ideally I'd use some kind of 3d scanner or CMM I don't have access to one right now and so I'm going to use my tormach as a poor-man's CMM this actually works pretty well especially if you have a probe and I don't see people doing this very frequently so you should try it out unfortunately the crock is too soft for my probe so I'm just eyeballing it so the astuteness are probably already thinking ahead and recognizing the fact that if I'm using some kind of probe to measure the surface of the tool so when it touches the crock say for example here the center of it is here but the surface is actually here so if I do this a bunch of times and I get a bunch of points and then I reconstruct it I'm going to get some surface like this it's going to be the croc plus the radius of this probe tip and it's gonna be the wrong size and this is actually not totally easy to deal with I can't just shift the points by the radius of the probe tip to be correct this one needs to go down this one needs go down and over this one needs to go totally right the way I'm going to deal with this problem is in the CAD once I generate this surface I'm just gonna offset it the way that it works is each point will be shifted along the direction perpendicular to the surface at that point which is exactly what we want the result so this is a bunch of points I load them into my CAD program and then I fit a surface to them once you have the surface it's pretty straightforward you can see I'm offsetting it here to account for the probe radius like I was talking about before I'll leave it as an exercise to the viewer from how to go to the surface to the tool but it it's very specific to the tool that you want but it's straightforward it's just cubes and things [Music] [Laughter] it looks like everything fits I went and cut out a blank for the press the idea behind the shape is it's sort of roughly the shape of the Steel Toe if I drop something really heavy on the toe and it flatten it out and the way that I hope that this works is that this tip here will hit first which will put a little bend in it so as it goes into the form it'll pull this end down into the form there's not a whole lot else to say let's give it a try it's not a very good look a lot of the creasing was initiated in these back corners where the sheet metal was stabbed by these points the reason I have this flat back here is so that the back of this form can press against the inner side of the core and just give me a good squeeze on the front but I don't actually need it so I'm gonna do is machine this off just to make it smooth let's try it this is the problem it's completely jamming the part I'm now succeeded in making - pretty ugly pieces of garbage so interesting thing about these is that they're unbelievably stiff compared to the raw sheet that's because they have this nice curvature at the top of the surface this is how they make cars they press form for example the door add a really thin sheet metal if you saw the sheet metal that they make cars out of you would say there's no way you can make a car out of this but they do so for their parts look a lot nicer than mine speaking as a complete novice here I believe what's happening is I'm just trying to force too much change into the material too quickly interesting thing is that the wood tools can definitely take forming the steel like it's not really damaging it I can just get the right shape for this I think I can form this they occurred to me that there was one more thing I hadn't tried which is worth trying before I go through all the trouble of making more forms the idea is to press this way the advantage of this is that it's doing a whole lot less drawing of the material because it's only going down a few inches so I'll just see if it works at all and I just quickly off-camera axion see this out of it the press Ram will go into this hole this will hold it nominally square and then I will smash the metal down into here this made a perfect slide this works all make something actually proper I still think what's happening even this direction is less severe shoving me into this hall there's no way to fold up with the side edge in the front edge at the same time without getting a crease think about wrapping paper you have to put the crease in the corner in order to fold fold around a corner this is the sheet metal doing almost exactly the same thing I've converted this little block of four by four into hopefully a serviceable tool who knew pressure-treated four by fours don't machine that well in a CNC machine with a roughing end mill probably no one knew because I'm the only guy trying to do that reason I'm using roughing end mills is just all I have the one other thing that I did is I took my press form mount and I chopped 45 degrees off of it so that it will go at a 45 degree angle into this as well and so this stack up should avoid that whole sliding problem that I had because it's going straight in alright so all I got to do is just get this mounted up and then we can give it a shot this is almost croc shaped I'm still getting these creases in the corners would almost fit over the croc which is kind of cool it seems like the material is bending up and then that's allowing it to crease and so what I'm gonna try to do is clamp the material to the surface around it and then press in and my hope is that will constrain it enough that it it can't lift up increase its definitely and introduce all kinds of weird new stresses into the material and it very likely may be a complete fail so let me quickly build some kind of clampy thing let's try it again so from looking at the tool what it looks like happened is the metal still force the tool apart and was able to bend but this does look a whole lot nicer than the previous ones it was just the absolute worst thing ever is doing things the right way is just the worst this is a totally from the ground up new set of tools that I think take all the lessons I learned with the other ones and do them more right side the outer cavity here this is what I'll be pressing the sheet metal into there's a big smooth surface that gets pulled down into so there's no nukes or crannies for the sheet metal to fold into and get creased and now also has a lead out on this side so the metal is getting pulled on all edges I think that'll help bounce the forces and help prevent wrinkling this tool is also strangely beautiful I love the two-tone so far all the tools that I've made have been much more beautiful than functional this is the new cavity tool the reason it's on this cuboid thing is that I need to be very well located relative to the outer form if it's not located well it'll hit and then twist and it won't be able to get all the way in this was a big problem with those previous hack tools that I had because they were attached to the press frame and that thing has an enormous amount of play and there's just no way they're gonna go right in the way that they need to what I do is I have this this outer frame it's made of two by fours but it really doesn't matter this will slide into and it will locate it as I press it down this frame has holes reverse and precision pins this sits on these pins and it locates it accurately to where this form is one final details I take the blank and I clamp it with four bolts when I set this on here so it gets pinched and can only go down into the hall so I think that's enough talk let's find out if this was a giant waste of time or not [Music] to the press it's still generating enough force to bend this get that it's not crazy the would totally bent itself up into a little donut I think if I can increase my clamping here probably with a piece of steel then clamp the heck out of that that might be what I need Wow we almost have a steel toe the site is just about good this side is good this side is definitely a fail but close and this is the this is the only really bad artifact it's pretty amazing you can see that this is not square at all wanted to get compressed down but it just couldn't do it without buckling I think this will work if I super clamp the material down with not wood I think wood is gonna not be able to take it so I just took some 3/16 plate that I had and cut out these clampy bits that would go between the upper clamp in the sheetmetal this will hopefully keep the metal from creasing upwards these parts turned out great I think plasma cutters are really underrated this is straight out of the plasma cutter look at that edge this is about as much clamping is I'm gonna be able to get without changing the design so I hope that it's enough bit of distortion but greatly improved it looks like the wood just couldn't take it and bucket all right we now have a piece of protective armor for the four by fours I'm gonna type some clamping some extra clamping surface area so I can really get a bunch of clamps in there and super clamp this down all that stuff I said about doing things the right way yeah it's out the window this is actually fairly typical for prototyping where you build a prototype you learn stuff and then you try to modify it to apply what you've learned to prove that it works and then if this works I'll probably make another one that does it more correctly and it'll hopefully mostly work there's no point in going and building a whole new one just to test what I learned because if it doesn't work then I wasted all that time that's why I'm building this in such hacky way rather than building another revision all right moment of truth it's a lot better that's total dick you guys looking this is so stupid the one little tiny crack between my two stiffeners the steel shot up in between it so there's ripples all throughout the outside but within the formed area the only real defects are from where it squeezed up into the space between the stiffener we're definitely getting a whole lot better than we were let me see if I can find the original one of these here's the what yeah I didn't I never claimed to know what I'm doing and I just know what I'm trying to do oh this is so tantalizingly close can I get it out of this tool without making another one that is the question I bet I could make it work I just weld these two together so that there's no gap anymore it's a wonderful thing wouldn't you become one is it not I think we've just might be able to squeeze a good form out of this tool let's get this in the press I now have a clamp on basically every location that I saw the metal bowing up before probably what's gonna happen is the metal is gonna find a new place to bow out the probably two more are going to appear but if we're very lucky we'll get a pretty good format oh yeah perfect just kidding I think it's almost what we want very cool wow that's crazy cuz symmetric this wrinkling is it's like perfectly symmetric that cool and look this side too that is so cool I'm gonna cut this out the overall fit is pretty good but the reason it looks so stupid is that as I redesigned the tool over and over again I incremental II removed slices of the final form the biggest chunk that came off actually was the radiuses for this final tool thing added almost a half inch radius to the tool which took a half-inch off this all the way around so that's why it's so in completely formed so I have some ridiculously large wooden cubes these are my new tool this is the smallest of the cubes and then this this is the big boy this is actually several four by four or two by fours glued together and then they've been planed top and bottom so they're nice and flat and they'll mate well with each other the way that this is built is there's two levels which are kind of the core guide this big brick here is the core it's a lot bigger than the previous core because I ivory digitized the croc and made it so that I'm actually getting the whole shoe and instead of one of these lame kind of half steel toes let's get these into the machine and get them machined and then hopefully give this thing a try [Music] so all the tools are done I have the core guides there's two of these these are one guide the core down in the right spot when I'm pressing it like this and then those are the most boring part bottom material to remove really hard on the cutters I've got the this is really cool-looking and I added these threaded rods in compression this is so that I'm not relying only on the glue joints to hold it together because this is the part of me pushing up on with the press and I'm worried if I push in the center it's gonna tend to snap it apart I have this inset here so I can take a piece of sheet metal that I just plasma cut and set it in like this this should protect the surface from dentin it's only 16 gauge I have some 12 gauge in 14 gauge but it's too heavy for me to get on to the plasma cutter by myself and my wife is asleep so 16 gauge is the size that I used they have a matching one which goes against one of these guide blocks above the sheet metal that I'm forming will go in between so the fact that the sides don't line up exactly just doesn't really matter I wasn't actually even really trying to line those up thing that matters is that when you look inside of it everything lines up this is a result of how I machined it everything was machined with all the pins in the same operation relative to the same jig so everything was using the same coordinate system and they all line up really well so the core guides hold the core nice and straight and in the right spot and it just slides in down when I press it and smash to the sheet metal in the right spot you could say it fits like a glove really well just going to modify the press figure out the blank shape that I want and then go for it maybe when I'm done with all this I'll use the CNC to make some wooden croc clogs they sound terrible to wear but the novelty factor seems like it might be worth it so everything's loaded up if I'm gonna be doing this lot I'll bolt all these things in position so I'll have to manually align them but notice that the pins are on the wrong side normally they're down below but these are above because I'm pushing up with this bottle Jack the sheet metal is really firmly clamped by this bottle jack here when this jack comes down and exerts a lot of force on the inside it will actually reduce the clamping force between these two faces because it's gonna be pushing down on this bottom one against this jack and as that compresses this will uncompress and get less and less compression I don't think that's a problem because the press doesn't develop significant force until the bottom of the stroke when I no longer need clamping alright the moment of truth it still did curl up a little bit mostly on that edge yes so there's one wrinkle but it is on the back side which is what I'm cutting off so that's fantastic the rest of it there's some very slight wrinkling on the front the question now is does it fit the croc it looks like it will let me get this cut out and see if it fits this is cool very exciting so I just sliced all the extra material off in the bandsaw and I'd say that the quality is there but the shape isn't quite right still mainly it looks like I really underestimated this spring back I did actually try to crack that a bit in the tool I gave it a 1 and 1/2 degree extra angle but it looks like when you have a compound Bend and I think this makes sense the spring back is more severe if I want a mass-producible part say that I could sell if there was interest then I would need to redesign the tool one more time just to get this edge more straight it looks like the spring back is like 10 degrees here which is gigantic you can see the really bad spring back here it's not sitting flush on the edge of the shoe anywhere it should be sitting flush and because it's sprung out it basically doesn't wrap around the edges the way that it should this is definitely not ready for mass production but the technique the technique I think works though this is pretty cool I have their tool to make but I'm actually I'm pretty darn tired of making tools I think I'll come back to this project but I'll call this it's called this tentative part one for now you know maybe there's enough demand for steel toed crocks maybe then I'll make them I don't know if my demand is sufficient to go through the pain of making yet another tool but I did learn a ton and I am actually really happy with these results I'll almost certainly be using this technique for future things where I need to make a bunch of sheet metal parts that are complicated one cool thing that I would probably do if I was making this in mass production is I would use a 3d cut profile on the plasma cutter so I would basically make a jig that holds the thing and then I would cut out the shape on the plasma cutter and then finish the edges somehow I think this is a good place to end it you can use your cheap Oh Harbor Freight 20-ton press to press form legitimately nice parts using legitimately cheap wood tools it does take some iteration to get the tool right at least for something hard like this I think if you had something that had less requirements in terms of fit it might be able to do it in one shot hopefully you enjoyed it thanks

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 1,872,160

Rating: 4.9089375 out of 5

Keywords: crocs, diy, hydraulic press, wooden tools, steel toe, steel toe crocs, engineering, steel toe boots, prototyping, product design, tormach 1100mx, tormach, press forming, digitization, reverse engineering, reverse engineer, crocs shoes, sheet metal, plasma cutter, stuff made here, milling machine, sheet metal forming, cnc machine, useful things, machine shop, how to make, mechanical engineering

Id: IcjgrB9vTec

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020