IT should come as a relief to manufacturers that, despite the increasing complexity of sheetmetal working equipment, the principles of choosing the most economical and efficient option are still relatively straight forward.
According to Headland Machinery’s sales and marketing director, Annaliese Kloe, no matter what the application, manufacturers’ first priority should be to buy reliable equipment that can do the job, and is well supported and serviced locally.
Once equipment is in place, Kloe says manufacturers must take steps to ensure it is used to its full potential.
“Number one, you’ve got to get the material to the machine as fast as possible,” Kloe told Manufacturers’Monthly.
“Offline programming is also becoming very important,” she said.
“In the sheetmetal industry as a whole, CAD/CAM software is playing a large part. The software can make what you do more efficient, it can help the design of new products, it can streamline your operations with networking, and reduce the time you have to have an operator standing around in front of the machine playing around with the controller instead of just getting throughput,” Kloe said.
She added that efficient materials handling to remove completed components is equally important.
Kloe also suggests manufacturers run the machine for more than one shift to decrease cost per hour. “If you are able to run that machine over night and automate that machine, that is where you get your efficiencies and you can minimise costs.”
Advanced Sheetmetal Technologies managing director, Ingo Bentrup claims automation can also provide extra production capacity. Bentrup told Manufacturers’ Monthly about a sheetmetal job shop in Sydney’s South West that replaced several turret punching machines with two automated machines.
“Typically before, if they had a peak in demand, they would have to initiate overtime. They would have to initiate shifts. And all that takes time to organise and is sometimes quite difficult to organise.
“With automated equipment, they’re able to basically run the machine unmanned so they can tap into that sort of capacity over night, over the weekend, and it gives them the ability to respond to customers without the problems associated with trying to work longer hours,” he said.
Bentrup added safety concerns are also attracting sheetmetal workers to automation.
“Handling sheetmetal is difficult and dangerous. Sheets are awkward to handle by people and they have very sharp edges so this is something that’s being looked at by manufacturers under current occupational health and safety laws to protect their workers,” he said.
According to Bentrup, now that many cutting processes have been automated, automating sheetmetal bending will be the next step.
“The bending of sheetmetal components is still predominantly done manually on press brakes and there, there are also occupational health and safety concerns.
“Press brakes are quite dangerous machines. They need sophisticated guarding which is expensive and reduces the throughput through those machines.
“So what we’re seeing, and what I think we will see, is in the same way turret presses replaced older type C-frame manually operated presses, we’re going to see computerised bending cells replacing conventional press brakes.”
Kloe agrees, adding bending machines are increasingly being fitted with custom-made automation equipment. “There are already some robots linked to bending machines, but what you’re going to be seeing is supplier specific, specifically made supplier machines, for their bending product. Instead of a third party robot…it’s tailor made for that machine which really increases the reliability and the through put,”
FJ Precision installed an automated panel bending machine in September last year, and according to CEO, and Sheetmetal Industry Association president, Colin Johnsen it has been “a great success”.
“It’s helping to reduce our lead times by helping to reduce our bottle neck of bending. But it’s also opened up many doors in as far as many new products. Things that we found difficult before, it’s made a walk in the park,” Johnsen told Manufacturers’ Monthly.
“Where you had a manual operator doing especially big panels, you’d have two operators on the same job. They had to lift together. Now the machine does it all in one hit with an operator only removing the finished goods. It automatically picks up the panel from a pack, loads it, references and shoots it out the back.”
Johnsen says the company has run automated processes for a long time. “We run a lights out operation where, for our second and third shifts, we turn out the lights and go home and the machines continue to produce and that’s been extremely beneficial for us,” he said.