Method of spring rate adjustment
AssigneeHutchinson Technology Incorporated
InventorMichael W. Davis
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Abstract
A method of controlling the spring rate of a spring region of an unassembled or partially or fully assembled load beam for a disk drive head suspension by providing the spring region with a number of bridges which may then selectively opened to achieve a target spring rate. Adjusting the spring rate in this manner provides control of resulting performance characteristics of the head suspension. In one aspect, a data set of spring rate reductions corresponding to bridge sets removed is predetermined and used with the corresponding type of load beam to determine the bridges to remove to approximate the target spring rate.
Claims20
A method for controlling the variation in spring rate of a spring region of a head suspension having a longitudinal axis comprising the steps of:
- a. forming a load beam with a spring region having a plurality of bridges parallel to the longitudinal axis and an initial spring rate greater than a desired target spring rate;
- b. determining an actual initial spring rate of the spring region of the load beam;
- and
- c. removing at least one bridge to reduce the spring rate to closely approach or equal the desired target spring rate.
A method for predicting a reduction in variation of spring rate between an actual initial spring rate and a desired target spring rate for of a particular type of load beam of the type having a longitudinal axis comprising the steps of:
- a. forming a set of data pairs in which individual predetermined spring rate reductions are associated with respective sets of bridges to be removed from a particular type of load beam;
- b. forming a load beam of that particular type having a spring region and a plurality of bridges in the spring region;
- c. determining an actual initial spring rate of the load beam;
- and
- d. determining the number of bridges to open to adjust the actual initial spring rate to approach a desired target spring rate, by selecting one data pair from the set of data pairs formed in step a.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.