Mass customization leads to very short product life cycles, so the costs of a tool have to be amortized with a low number of workpieces. Especially for highly loaded tools, like those for forging, that leads to expensive products. Therefore more economical production processes for tool manufacturing have to be investigated. As laser additive manufacturing is already used for the production of moulds for injection moulding, this technology maybe could also improve the forging tool production. Within this paper laser metal deposition, which is industrially used for tool repair, will be investigated for the use in tool manufacturing. Therefore a mechanical characterization of parts built with different laser process parameters out of the hot work tool steel 1.2709 is made by upsetting tests and hardness measurements. So the influence of the additive manufacturing process on the hardness distribution is analysed.
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