I believe it was the fall of 1998. We were in business, and ready to make our mark on the world. My partner, Tom, and I had successfully grown the business from just two guys with ambition, renting shop time and resources from two other local small machine shops, to renting our own shop, and owning our own machinery.
We had been able to acquire a tired old Taiwanese "Bridgeport" mill, a sweet old Agie EDM machine, and a 150-ton Toshiba mold press which we snagged from a local shop up the road that had fallen on hard times. Plus, my dad had "invested" by loaning us an oldie-but-goodie Maho MH-700C 4-axis CNC milling machine. In short, we had some equipment, a decent amount of collective experience and talent, and a whole lot of ambition. There was pretty much nothing I thought we couldn't do, so when someone said, "Hey, can you do this?" our answer was always, "Sure. Why not?"
So when one Mr. San White walked into our shop one day, tossed a couple of crudely made, sand-cast aluminum, Mexican lime squeezers on the bench, and said, "I wanna mass produce these by aluminum die-casting. Can you build me a die-set?" We said, "Sure. We can do that." And the rest became history.
Although I had no experience with die-casting at the time, I had considerable experience designing and building plastic injection molds, and I immediately reasoned to myself, "It's the same physical process, just with different working materials... how hard can it be?" Thus began a new pursuit of personal expertise.
The first step, of course, was to educate myself on the design and configuration of die-cast tooling, using my knowledge of injection molds as a springboard. It really just amounted to differential training, so the task seemed (and in fact was) not terribly daunting.
Of course, we also needed to find an aluminum die-casting house that could produce the parts, and which would be able and willing to assist us in tooling design. We hit the jackpot when we discovered SKS Die Casting in Alameda, California. They were extremely friendly and extremely helpful. We explained to them our experience and our goals, and they just stepped up to help. I cannot remember exactly where we got the mold base for the tool, but I know that it was not new (it had been used for some other product) so it must have come from them.
We needed to give Mr. White a quote for the cost of the die-cast tool, which meant that I needed to be pretty sure of the technical requirements. After a little study, I had my number, so we gave him the quote, and he gave us the job. Everything was great, and we were under way.
The Design
The first step was to come up with the detailed product design, and right here is where I later learned a lesson: Don't give your design efforts away. I may have included product design as a billable line item—I don't recall—but even if I did, I'm sure that it was under-valued. I was just so happy to get the job that I figured this industrial design work, which I thoroughly enjoyed, would be worth the effort of my voluntary contribution. Plus, I wanted to provide the customer a really cool product, because I wanted to do cool stuff. And as long as we were building a die-cast die, we might as well build one that makes cool parts.
I commenced with the product design using TriSpectives, an amazing new 3D design program which I had purchased in 1997 for $500. I had made that purchase realizing that this new program could likely replace the likes of ProEngineer, a solid modeling program that was simply outside our reach as it cost about $15,000 per seat at the time, requiring specialized workstation hardware to run well. TriSpectives, however, could run on a reasonably powerful Windows computer.
At one point in 1997, when we were acutely tight on cash, Tom encouraged me to return the software since it's satisfaction guarantee was still valid, and we were really tight on cash. We were also running low on money. I resisted, knowing I really needed that software, even though we didn't yet have a computer that could really run it. So we quickly parlayed some of the down-stroke funds on this job into a new computer, plus—whaddya know? Trispectives got purchased by Visionary Design Systems, turned it into IronCAD, and offered a stunningly affordable upgrade path to current Trispectives owners. Boom! We were suddenly on the cutting edge of 3D solid modeling technology. Those were heady days.
I was able to come up with what I thought was a pretty elegant design. The shapes comprised basically a hemisphere for the bowl sections and a B-spline lofted handle. The software was able to smoothly blend all the shapes with beautiful fillets of constant or variable radii. The top of the bowl on the upper half was truncated with an elliptical subtractor, then the edges were blended. 
I was very pleased with the design, and I thought at the time, "This is epic. This should make me famous." Seriously, that's how much I loved the design, and I suspect that this is the kind of passion that possesses and motivates true artists. In fact, I think it would be really cool to build a giant twenty-foot sculpture of one of these things as the centerpiece of an industrial design park somewhere on earth. Yeah; that would be great...
Once the design was finished, we ordered a stereo lithography prototype from 3D Systems of Santa Clarita, California. I think this prototype cost about $375. Not a bad price, considering that the 3D printing machines of the day cost around a million dollars. Back in those days, SLA parts were known to be structurally fragile and brittle. Having failed to express this to the customer as he was examining it, he set it down (rather roughly) on the table after handling it, and it broke into two pieces. Bummer. But there it was. He gave the approval, and away we went.
Get Your Quotes Right
Our quote for the job, including design of the parts, design of the tool, and fabrication of the tool was about $40,000. It may have been a bit more, but I know it wasn't 50. The reason I know this, is because I later figured out that I had made a major blunder in my calculations, thinking that we would have to make four cavities and four cores, but forgetting that there were two of everything, since the tool would produce both a lime squeezer and a lemon squeezer (the latter having a larger bowl) I really should have quoted $70 or $80 thousand, which to me at the time seemed like an inconceivable amount to charge for any job. I was young and bushy-tailed... What can I say? In the end, I remember telling someone that I think I earned about $16 an hour on the whole job. But hey, who really keeps count of that stuff when you're trying to make your mark on the world, right? It was an investment...
I remember remarking to Mr. White that I had realized my error, and that was the reason for our failure to meet our projected schedule, though I never hit him up for more money. That would have been sorely unprofessional, and my own pride simply wouldn't allow it. From his response, I got the feeling that another quote he had received was on the order of $80,000, but I don't know this for fact, though it's not terribly difficult to presume. He was simply tolerant of the delays.
Tool Fabrication
Once the design was frozen I commenced designing the cavities and cores of the tool. At that time we had no CNC CAM software, so I enlisted the help of a former coworker, Mr. Don "Zack" Zacher of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, to generate the G-code files for machining the mold blocks and EDM electrodes. I believe he used SURFCAM software, and after I helped set up a post-processor for our machine, he delivered the CAM files. Somehow it all just worked.
This job involved a lot of EDM time, and I remember breaking out with a fairly major rash on my upper and lower arms as a result of spending so much time somewhat submerged in EDM fluid. I later invested in the much-more-expensive "gatorade" EDM electrolyte, but at the time we were running an affordable custom blend of kerosene and mineral spirits. Old school, but effective.
Thinking back now, I don't know why my memory is so absent of so many details. But at SKS there was a chief engineer whose name escapes me (I think it was Ron). He was "an old guy" (which I am now) with tons of experience, and a great sense of humor, and he was nothing but helpful in every regard. One bit of trivia: he liked to refer to a number of sixteenths of an inch as "steenths." I took it as an old-guy's response to all these young bucks who like to refer to thousandths of an inch as "thous." He basically trained me in the discipline of die-cast tool design, offering me invaluable tips and how-to's to achieve a successful tool—all free of charge! He was a great guy, and I could not have succeeded without his input.
The days leading up to our delivery of the tool were, well, interesting and hectic. As I recall, we had scheduled our arrival at SKS with the tool, and we had blown through that schedule twice, due to the fact that I had so underestimated the volume of work required to fabricate and assemble the thing.
For one, this die set, fully assembled with cores, cavities, and mold base (the surround structure and ejection system) weighed over a ton, which was at least twice as heavy as anything we had ever handled. We didn't own a forklift, and we had no neighbors from whom we could borrow one, so we used our Harbor Freight cherry picker to move things around. I remember at one point, in the middle of a lift, when this engine hoist, extended beyond its normal range, began to lean sideways, getting ready to tip over. I think both of us jumped onto the high side as a human counter balance, and thus somehow averted disaster. We both knew we had no business attempting what we were doing, but neither of us let that bother us. We just did what we had to do. We did, however, decide not to try to lift the thing fully assembled again.
Delivery
As our third scheduled delivery date approached, neither of us wanted to blow through it. So I think I worked three twenty-hour days doing final machining, fitting, and assembly, and then pulled an all-nighter finishing it off. Tom rented the mini box van that we would use to haul the thing four hours north up highway 101, and we loaded the mold halves in the back, one at a time. Since we had no means of pushing the mold forward once it was in there, most of the weight was aft of the rear axle, making handling characteristics rather interesting. Tom drove while I slept. We pulled into the Bay Area and found a cheap hotel. Tom slept while I slept some more. Good times.
Then came the morning of our arrival at SKS, with the tool in the back of our bobtail rental truck. As Tom rolled up the rear door, I couldn't escape the feeling that we were in the middle of some kind of reveal scene of some reality TV show. Two or three guys whom we didn't know came over, one at a time, to have a look at this tool that they apparently had heard was coming. I got the feeling they wanted to see what kind of cluster-of-errors they were in for, having been warned that a customer-designed, customer-built tool was due to arrive for first article production. No comments were verbalized, but I sensed a subtle bit of surprise and implied tentative approval, which I took as a grand complement. Because I knew that if there were anything seriously wrong with the tool, we would have heard objections—or at least questions—immediately. Different shops have different cultures, but pretty much anywhere you go, there's that guy with a microchip on his shoulder, the resident naysayer, who cannot resist proffering his predictions of doom due to some element of design that falls short of his own expectations. But we heard none of that. It was almost as though these guys were all rooting for us, and it felt good, I gotta say.
So they unloaded the tool and set the halves on the shop floor. I was initially apologetic that it was separated, not assembled, but they said that was no big deal. They put a box over each half and blew hot air into each so as to preheat the tool. I was intrigued by this because in plastic injection molding, you really never want to handle the mold halves alone (you always pre-assemble them on the bench prior to mounting them in the press), and preheating before mounting is never done. But they didn't mind at all. It was all very routine for them.
Meanwhile, we went into the front office for coffee and small talk while the tool preheated. Tom and I contained our excitement professionally, as we all anticipated the first shots of this ostensibly amateur-built die set, wondering how the parts would come out. Then the word came from the shop floor: "Okay, let's run some initial shots." The first several shots revealed some basic, yet not unforeseeable problems: One of the cores on the bowl feature apparently had an undercut which was causing the part to stick to the wrong half of the mold, creating a problem for part ejection. It could have been easy for me to be embarrassed by this, because it's a pretty basic issue of design (or, in this case, fabrication), but it's also not entirely unexpected on a tool such as this, so it wasn't a huge problem. We fixed it in situ by cutting some undercuts into the cavity on the opposing side—an action that is not optimal, done only as a concession in the heat of the moment, since the cost of mounting the tool and running parts is considerable, though done largely as a courtesy, not being billed the full going rate. Basically, I knew that if I were to pull the tool and do the proper rework to fix the problem, then our customer (SKS) would be less willing to suffer the delay and added labor, plus we would have to delay delivery of initial run parts to our customer, Mr. San White.
Then there was the other, far more significant error: there were some features on the mold that I totally blew chunks on, and machined them in backwards. This was a thing that could not be quickly fixed; it would require that we take the tool back to the shop and do significant rework in order to fix the error. But that was okay, since this kind of thing is not all that uncommon. It just meant that the job wasn't quite finished yet, and a little more time would pass before we could receive our final payment. In the end, it all worked out. The customer got a good die-cast die, a good product, and we got paid. The planets had realigned.
— As this story is a work in process, there will be more to come —
—Umm, excuse me, but I think I remember custom-designing that sturdy press myself. ;-)
