Activities and solutions

Forging consists of forming parts made of metallic material generally from a bar or wire rod. The high precision of the process in terms of dimensions and surface finishes, its sobriety in terms of the material used, the increase in mechanical characteristics and its high production rates make it an efficient process. Hot or semi-hot forging, by heating, improves the forgeability of the parts. Hot forging and stamping is carried out at a temperature of around 1200°C for steel. Cold stamping, which is similar to cold forging, differs by the use of horizontal presses with very high
production rates. Walor’s advantage is that it masters all these techniques and has been the European leader in the automotive market for 50 years.

Free cutting is a machining technique that consists of manufacturing turning products by removing material from metal bars, using cutting tools on automatic of digitally controlled very high speed mechanical lathes. The parts are machined successively in a bar generally having the diameter closest to the outer diameter, the goal being to obtain the best productivity for high accuracy. Generally, the parts undergo subsequent operations (mechanical, thermal or chemical) before being used in the creation of subsets. Walor has been mastering these technologies for almost a century in the Arve Valley and in most of its other production sites.

Machining is a group of techniques for manufacturing parts by chip removal but from a blank made by another technology (sawing, forging, foundry, ..) and for shapes that can be more complex.
The means can be similar to free cutting, the machine tools used being mainly digitally controlled, but the parts are more complex to adapt to the shape of the blanks that must be machined.
Walor uses multiple material removal processes that can fall into this category: broaching, grinding, cutting, lapping, threading, drilling, tapping, … These operations can be complementary or integrated into the free cutting machines.

Using appropriate procedures and means, inspections ensure that manufactured products, their components or process parameters, comply with internal specifications and customer requirements. Inspections are carried out at frequencies and sampling sizes defined according to statistical methods to ensure maximum safety. The checks carried out can be destructive (hardness, structure, test bench, etc.) or non-destructive (dimensional measurements, appearance, eddy currents, ultrasound, etc.). Most products manufactured by Walor are safety parts whose risk analyses lead to the implementation of the most efficient automated controls.

A heat treatment is a succession of operations in which a solid material is wholly or partially subjected to thermal cycles to obtain a change in its properties (especially mechanical strength) and / or its structure.
They are used in Walor processes:

• To improve the performance of products delivered to the customer (quenching, induction hardening, nitrocarburizing, nitration, …)
• To allow or facilitate subsequent internal operations (deformation or machining) with the customer (annealing, recrystallization, spheroidizing, isothermal, …).

In the metal forming and machining trades, tooling is an essential component of the process. Walor masters the entire process of designing and producing tools. Specialized departments manufacture most of the forging, machining and control tooling, supported by our centre of excellence in Walor Laval . The equipment used to make these tools makes it possible to shape materials with ever more extreme properties.