How a cookie cutter is made - GIF

[PJs]

Why are the steps sequential? Is this just incidental, or is there a good reason for not doing all of these presses at once?

It's possible they could be done at one time as long as the punch dies don't interfere with each other to form the radii at the extremities. When all are closed you can see a slight gap between the dies at the radii which tells me they had to work the dies carefully with the timing to get a nice radii without deformation. My guess is that doing them all at once might cause some deformations at the quadrants of the radii and perhaps the straighter lengths. Single acting gives the ring time to settle for the next one to fire and doing it sequentially around the perimeter allows the stretching metal to move toward the seam at the crotch, as the last op to take up any additional stretched metal...that is why I mentioned the seam location previously. Note the slight gap at the seam in the final pic of the cutter. I do think the timing could be a bit faster though.

Great Tool Talk post and good question Jon, Thanks!