Development of Cold Forging Process of Hollow-type Wheel Nut Wrench for Commercial Vehicles

A wheel nut wrench is one of the hand tools used to loosen and tighten lug nuts on automobile wheels and it has generally a solid-type geometry for commercial vehicles. However, the solid-type wheel nut wrenches manufactured by hot forging processes exhibit several drawbacks such as heavy weight and rough surface finish. Thus, many efforts have been devoted to change the part geometry and improve the manufacturing process. For this purpose, the weight of the final product can be reduced drastically using a hollow tube as the initial stock, which can be manufactured by the more economical manufacturing process of cold forging. In this study, the cold forging of a hollow-type wheel nut wrench for commercial vehicles was designed based on the results of fundamental experiments and CAE analyses using the commercial finite element code DEFORM-3D. In addition, cold forging experiments were conducted on a special-purpose forming machine for hollow wheel nut wrenches in order to validate the designed process sequence. As results, it was found that the final products with a weight reduction of 39% and better surface appearance can be manufactured without any defect with the newly designed cold forging process.

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