About

Hello, my name is James Miktuk, founder and president of Aggressive Design Services, and welcome to my website.

Just to give you a little background about myself, for a little over a decade, I worked as a journeyman die maker at a few northeast Ohio tool & die shops. This was during an era that was just beginning to see the use of the WEDM machine to assist in the construction of dies. In other words, I was still having to form grind and piece sections together to construct tools. It was also necessary, as a die maker, to sketch my own detail drawings onto a sketch pad and calculate various angles and lengths using my little trig book. I’m not sure I could find a little trigonometry book now. My have times changed.

I started to design progressive dies on the board in 1988. They were primarily automotive dies, some up to 144” long. Fortunately, I had a drafting table that was 12 feet long. Two years later, I implemented Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) into the progressive die design process. I believe the computer that I started with was a IBM 386 machine with a whopping 1 MB of memory. It's hard to believe at the time that this was faster than drafting dies on the board.

In 1992, I founded Aggressive Design Services, designing stamping dies for area tool & die shops and stamping houses.

Initially, all the designs were created in 2D with AutoCAD. The designs were looked very similar to the designs I created on the board except now drawings could be plotted out in color. The main benefit of the 2D design was all the lines and arcs were precisely positioned allowing for direct use to create WEDM tool paths, now the standard for die construction. Copying and pasting objects also allowed for much quicker designs.

In 1995, I acquired a revolutionary 3D design software which set the standard for all others, SolidWorks 95. With 3D die components, details could be precisely CNC machined. No longer were wooden models and plaster Keller aids required to machine complex surfaces. Although due to computer hardware limitations, only a few of the more complex components were designed in 3D. The bulk of the design was still created with AutoCAD.

The past few years have seen enormous strides with both computer hardware and software. Now, the resources are available to design the entire die in 3D quickly and economically. The benefits of this are numerous.

• 3D components are linked to the BOM so if the component changes size, material, heat-treat, or quantity, the BOM updates automatically.
• The entire design can be checked for interfering components.
• Detail drawings are quickly created since the component has already been created. The drawings also automatically update when a revision to the component occurs.

Although designs are created with state of the art 3D software and techniques developed over years of use, 2D design work can still be provided. This is particularly helpful when working with legacy designs which require a revision change.

I have designed several hundred dies over the past twenty years ranging from small electrical clips to large automotive framing members. This experience translates into reliable designs based upon proven techniques.