Ensure Long Life for Your Tooling
And Get More Holes

At Cleveland Steel Tool, we recognize that you buy tooling for the holes it will produce, so getting the most holes from your tooling is a primary concern. We recommend that you begin with high quality products from Cleveland Steel Tool. Our in-house heat treating facilities and computer-based manufacturing processes ensure that you receive consistent, high performance tooling.

To get more quality holes with your tooling,
we offer the following tips:

• Punch only the appropriate thickness of material the tooling was designed for.

• Use the proper punch-to-die clearance for metal thickness punched.

• Periodically check coupling nuts and die pockets for tightness of tooling and tool alignment.

• Maintain correct placement of stripper to prevent tilting or cocking of the workpiece during stripping.

• Use punch keyways and die locating spots to maintain shaped tooling alignment.

• Use a punching lubricant whenever possible.

• Replace worn tooling.

We do not recommend that ironworker punches be sharpened. Punches are made with a back taper to aid in reducing stripping forces. When punches are sharpened, they lose this back taper as well as size and surface hardness. The result will cause excessive burrs, deformation of the punched material, and poor hole quality requiring costly secondary operations. Additionally, poorly sharpened and worn tooling can lead to increased wear and tear on your punching equipment.