When a manufacturer brought stainless steel tubing into Orbitform’s Solutions Lab, the goal seemed straightforward — form a groove in the tube end. On the customer’s .065" wall stainless steel tubing, our standard approach worked, to drive the full groove geometry in one motion. When we looked at their thicker walled parts, what followed was a real-world demonstration of why servo articulating roller forming was developed.
Todd, Senior Lab Technician at Orbitform, walked through the challenge directly.
“It takes so much force to try and form all that material all at once to the shape that we want it to,” he explained. “And it was also doing some other unsavory things — like creating a hex shape.”
That hex shape — an unwanted deformation caused by the roller hammering against the harder stainless material — was showing up even after the part was formed. Stainless steel doesn’t behave like mild steel. It pushes back.
The Fix Wasn’t More Force — It Was a Smarter Path
Rather than using a wide roller and trying to drive the full groove geometry in one motion, Todd’s team thinned out the roller geometry. A narrower roller could reach the required depth without overwhelming the machine’s force capacity. Then, using the servo thrust axis, they pushed the roller down as the spindle rotated — using motion to create the width of the groove rather than brute force.
“We’ll just thin out the geometry of the roller so that we can drive the material to the depth that we want to easily,” – Todd
Where It Gets Harder
The .065" wall application is a proven result. The groove forms cleanly, the hex deformation is gone, and the secondary machining operation is eliminated. That’s the problem solved.
Now the lab is focused on the next challenge: the same customer’s .109" wall section. Thicker material means significantly more force, and at that wall thickness the downward motion that works cleanly on the thinner part hasn’t yet produced the defined edge geometry the application requires.
That’s exactly why the Solutions Lab exists. Not just to run parts, but to find where the process works, identify where it doesn’t, and keep pushing until it does. The .109" application is the current frontier — and when it’s solved, we’ll share that story too. Sharing a project at this stage reflects a real part of application development.
Progress sometimes means producing an acceptable part. Other times, it means understanding the obstacle well enough to make the next experiment more useful.
What This Demonstrates
Neither of these solutions came from a catalog or calculation. They came from running the parts, identifying what wasn’t working, and adjusting — the roller geometry, the servo thrust path, the forming sequence.
That’s what the Solutions Lab is for. And it’s what servo control makes possible. A programmable forming path means the process can be tailored to the part, not the other way around.
For the technical foundation behind the Servo Articulating Roller Head — force capacity, programmable axes, the Thru-Spindle Pressure Pad — Orbitform covers it here: Expanding the Possibilities of Articulating Roller Forming with Servo Control.
If you have a part that’s been giving your current process trouble, Orbitform’s Solutions Lab can help you find the best fastening and forming process that aligns with your product requirements. Reach out to your local Regional Sales Manager.