Metal Craft Chosen to Spin 2019 Good Deeds Cup

The Chevrolet Hockey program aims to inspire positive values in young Canadians through hard teamwork and sport and also encourages the participants to perform positive deeds in their communities. The program enables Chevrolet to donate to causes across Canada on behalf of Peewee hockey teams. Players have performed hundreds of good deeds since the 2016/2017 culmination. Good deeds encouraged by the program include voluntary work at food banks, visiting an animal shelter, or driveway shoveling in the community.

However, the activities involved are limitless, as players are free to come up with and implement any suggestions. Good Deeds Champions receive different prizes, including the coveted Chevrolet Good Deeds Cup with the team’s name engraved. But how exactly is such a celebrated championship cup designed and made?

The Good Deeds Cup Design

Hockey Canada approached Jimmy Rogers of 39 Design and Engineering Inc. to design the Chevrolet Good Deeds Cup. He then contacted Metal Craft Spinning and Stamping to spin the cup portion of the trophy itself. This unique project allowed us to showcase our manual metal spinning capabilities while supporting a worthwhile charitable program.

The client asked us to fabricate the Good Deeds Cup from brass. This metal comes as a flat sheet with excellent formability properties, allowing for a smooth transformation into a cup. While brass is already a ductile metal, for this project we put it through several annealing cycles to make it more malleable. The annealing process involves treating the metal with heat to increase its ductility, but multiple rounds of annealing were necessary as brass heats up rapidly and gets hard quickly.

To create a high-end, long-lasting cup, we turned to our senior metal spinner, whose 30 years of hand spinning experience was the perfect match for the project. Our senior metal spinner has handled a wide range of complex pieces over the years, which means he could handle any issues that may arise to produce an exquisite masterpiece.

Since the end product was only one piece, the operator chose a hand spinning lathe instead of a CNC machine. Aside from the low volume, a hand spinning lathe is also ideal when you need maximum control. Manually spinning the piece allowed our senior metal spinner to feel the flow of the material.

Crafting this sophisticated piece required significant preparation and time. The spinner took five hours to produce the Good Deeds Cup. It was then polished and shipped to our client.

About Manual Metal Spinning

A typical hand metal forming process takes the following steps:

1. The operator mounts the mandrel chuck to the headstock. He then fixes the blank in position by advancing the follower block attached to the tail’s headstock.
2. A combination of a tool rest and pin serve as a support system for the lever arms. This arrangement gives the lever arms enough leverage to apply sufficient pressure to the blank against a forming tool like a roller.
3. A pass in manual metal spinning refers to one movement of the roller across the blank’s surface. The operator needs to run multiple passes to form one complete part. This can be achieved by increasing the pressure on the blank using the lever arms gradually to reduce the blank into the desired form.

For mass production and repeatable precision in large volume metal forming, Metal Craft Spinning & Stamping uses our CNC metal spinning machine rather than a hand lathe. This technology automates the passes, transforming the blank disc into intricate pieces within minutes.

Conclusion

Metal Craft Spinning & Stamping is a fourth-generation family business founded in 1969. We have earned a reputation for prompt delivery and quality service that surpasses customer expectations.

Our industry-leading metal spinning experts use advanced CNC machines, and hydraulic presses among other state-of-the-art equipment to meet the needs of hundreds of customers across North America that rely on us for thousands of quality parts. The shapes we produce are endless, including caps, balls, cones, bowls, lids, ferrules, and many more.

Contact us to put our 50 years of experience to work on your metal spinning or stamping project.