Material

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Schaeffer AG uses high-speed milling machines to process pre-cut rectangular main plates into customized front panels. This page lists the most commonly processed main plate materials. Please contact us if you would like to include other materials.

 

Aluminum

"The" basic material for front panels, above all due to its strength and the dyeability of its surface

Other materials

These essentially include several non-ferrous metals and a whole range of plastics

Customer-supplied material

Have your own material, semi-finished or finished parts, such as enclosure covers, etc. processed

Material thickness and object properties

In order to create a new front panel, you have to define the material thickness. With this choice you also determine the complete set of tools which are available for processing the front panel, more or less along the lines of: "The thicker the material, the more stable the tool has to be."

As a result, your design flexibility using object properties is subject to certain limitations as the thickness of the material increases. Whereas up to a thickness of 4 mm for example, a corner radius of 0 mm can be cut out with a 1 mm milling cutter (left picture), when the thickness is 10 mm, only the 3 mm milling cutter (right picture) is available.

You can find a description of the procedure that may be required for a change in material thickness here.

Unusable materials

In principle it is not possible for us to process steel. Its comparatively high hardness demands a cutting force for processing, which cannot be transmitted by the high performance spindles of our milling machines.

Among plastics, elastomers in particular can neither be adequately mounted nor systematically machined as a result of their softness. Many plastics quickly become pasty or even liquid during milling because of their chemical composition.

Clarification of the usability of your material

If you do not find the customer material in question described in the above chapters, please contact us with a sample for machining tests.