You want to conserve capital and reduce inventory, avoid production downtime, Meet production requirements all with fewer personnel.

To benefit your business, it’s important to manage your tooling costs on all fronts. When you choose top-quality tooling from Colonial Tool, you can run faster and with greater efficiency for improved productivity. The right tooling can also help save money and run a more efficient operation on other fronts, including:

• Conserving capital expenditures on tooling

• Reducing tooling inventory and complexity

• Avoiding production downtime and unplanned maintenance

• Meeting production requirements

• Reducing the required number of personnel

If your tool shop or production floor includes the machining of involute toothed forms, spline rolling tools from Colonial Tool can add significantly to your productivity and quality. Our spline roller tools allow for fast and consistent rolling and cold forming of a wide range of forms and shafts. The inherent accuracy of cold forming not only means less finishing work is required, but it also eliminates the creation of chips and the cost of subsequent cleaning and washing operations.

Spline Rolling

Spline rolling is the fastest and most economical method of producing involute toothed forms. Many different types of splines, threads, grooves and serrated forms can be rolled- Individually or in combination within 3-7 seconds

Cold Forming

The Cold Forming process is inherently accurate, with surface finishes of 3-6 micro-inches obtainable. Cold Forming is best suited for long productions runs or intermittent runs of a variety of parts.

With our advanced splining and cold forming tools, you can benefit in many ways:

Save Material

In using smaller-diameter shafts. Cold Forming forms teeth by displacing metal- the outside diameter actually "grows" during forming. You can eliminate expensive chip production. Without chips to clean away, you save time and money by eliminating additional steps to deburr your parts and clean up a mess of chips. The savings also include less equipment wear and less time spent filtering and cleaning cutting fluid contaminated with chips.

Stronger Shafts

Result from greater density of grain structure and reduced stress concentration. Fatigue failure is minimized, and in many cases torque load ratings are significantly increased. Tooth strength and shaft life are greatly improved, with 13-35% higher load carrying capacity over cut teeth. This is all using the same amount of material as with traditional machined shafts. You will quickly see a return on your spline cutting tooling investment thanks to these impressive improvements in quality and performance.

Smooth Surface Finishes

Within 3-6 micro-inches have been obtained with Cold Forming- thus the original fit with mating parts lasts much longer, reducing wear and minimizing backlash. With other shaft spline cutting methods, you often need to add additional steps to obtain the correct surface finish. Save time and money, and obtain perfect surface finishes every time with our advanced spline roller tools.

In addition to the cost and improved product advantage offered by Spline Rolling, is another important considerate—design flexibility.  Helical, Straight, Tapered Splines, and Serrations are some of the methods produced by the Cold Forming process in a variety of metals.  Some of the designs call for the spline section to be rolled up to a shaft shoulder—there is no longer a need for a tool clearance recess.

Fine pitch standard splines—formed by this method—deliver minimum torque, are easy to assemble, and permit savings in material.  Spline Rolling produced splines, may be heat-treated in the same manner as other similar parts.  

This is also a "chip-less" operation. Eliminating the production of chips removes a large headache for any tool crib managers or production line supervisors — dealing with the mess and hassle of post-machining chip removal. Metal chips can cause increased wear of tools and equipment, spark jams and blockages, and mean significant downtime for cleaning. Your parts also become contaminated with chips and require a costly cleaning or washing process to remove them. In some cases, chips aren’t fully removed and require additional deburring or deflashing operations.

It’s easy to see why choosing broaching splines for machining your shafts and other involute toothed forms without chips is a popular choice. At Colonial Tool, we can create custom spline tools for your tooling racks and rolling racks that are adapted to your products and cutting needs.

Contact us today to get more information or to request a free quote. Our industry-leading spline roller tools and cold forming tools will give you an advantage over traditional machining tools and let you increase your speed, efficiency and productivity, all while lowering your per-piece price. That’s a direct benefit to your bottom line, so tell us about your machining needs today and our team will get started finding the perfect solution.