Development of a novel cold forging process to manufacture eccentric shafts

Since the commercial usage of compact combustion engines, eccentric shafts have been used to transform translational into rotational motion. Over the years, several processes to manufacture these eccentric shafts or crankshafts have been developed. Especially for single-cylinder engines manufactured in small quantities, built crankshafts disclose advantages regarding tooling costs and performance. Those manufacturing processes do have one thing in common: They are all executed at elevated temperatures to enable the material to be formed to high forming degree. In this paper, a newly developed cold forging process is presented, which combines lateral extrusion and shifting for manufacturing a crank in one forming operation at room temperature. In comparison to the established upsetting and shifting methods to manufacture such components, the tool cavity or crank web thickness remains constant. Therefore, the developed new process presented in this paper consists of a combination of shifting and extrusion of the billet, which allows pushing material into the forming zone during shifting. In order to reduce the tensile stresses induced by the shifting process, compressive stresses are superimposed. It is expected that the process limits will be expanded regarding the horizontal displacement and form filling. In the following report, the simulation and design of the tooling concept are presented. Experiments were conducted and compared with corresponding simulation results afterwards.