Explosive forming is a metalworking technique in which an explosive charge is used instead of a punch or press. It can be used on materials for which a press setup would be prohibitively large or require an unreasonably high pressure, and is generally much cheaper than building a large enough and sufficiently high-pressure press; on the other hand, it is unavoidably an individual job production process, producing one product at a time and with a long setup time.There are various approaches; one is to place metal plate over a die, with the intervening space evacuated by a vacuum pump, place the whole assembly underwater, and detonate a charge at an appropriate distance from the plate. For complicated shapes, a segmented die can be used to produce in a single operation a shape that would req