When you think of die forming or stamping metal, you may think of large machinery that operates with tons of force. Did you ever think that you could die form something with a wooden die and just a few clamps?

This week, @CO and I set out to see if we could make our own hiking utensils out of stainless steel!

We started by modeling a spoon and a spork in SOLIDWORKS for Makers.

Then we sent DXF files of the flattened utensils to Send-Cut-Send (a service that will waterjet, laser cut, or CNC you designs).

We used the geometry of the utensils to model a die block (the lower part of the 'mold'), and a punch (the upper part of the 'mold')

We CNC routed the die components out of two pieces of IPE (pronounced e-pay). This is an incredibly dense species of wood that we thought would hold up to the compressive forces the die would experience when we clamped it shut with a few pipe clamps.

The die worked great, and we made spoons and sporks that we used on our annual family hike!

Check out this video to learn more about the designing and making of these custom utensils.

https://youtu.be/0YqX-F3uMz8

Feel free to download this zip file that contains the design files in native SOLIDWORKS format as well as STEP and DXF.