Ball swaging is a method of joining the head
gimbal assembly (HGA) with the arm of an E-Block by
plastically deforming part of the baseplate against the
arm. However, the force of the plastic deformation
causes deformation of the HGA, and can cause flying
height, static attitude, and vibration of the HGA to
vary. In this study, we performed an elasto-plastic
large-deformation analysis for ball swaging. Using the
experimental results, we verified the accuracy of the
numerical results for ball swaging and determined the
deformation mechanism and the effect of the ball
swaging. From these results, we clarified that the
baseplate is influenced by the arm deformation due to
the asymmetric stress and the baseplate deformation is
a superposition of the arm’s deformation on the baseplate’s
own deformation.