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Stainless steel producer orders tube-bending machine from specialist

STAINLESS STEEL COMPONENTS Byers produces components and assemblies mainly manufactured from stainless steel

STAINLESS STEEL COMPONENTS Byers produces components and assemblies mainly manufactured from stainless steel

Photo by Bloomberg

23rd October 2015

By: Kimberley Smuts

Creamer Media Reporter

  

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Intelligent tube technology specialist Unison last month received its first order for an all-electric computer numerically controlled (CNC) tube-bending machine, just five weeks after opening. The order was placed by industrial precision metal fabricator Byers Precision Fabricators for a versatile dual-head machine capable of meeting a diverse range of tube- and pipe-bending needs.

Byers produces components and assemblies mainly manufactured from stainless steel, as well as sheet and tubular aluminium. Most tubular parts are fabricated from 3/8" to 1” ANSI Schedule 40 or 80 stainless steel pipe stock.

Until now, Byers has outsourced most of its tube- and pipe-bending requirements to third-party suppliers, except for when the company employs manual bending techniques. However, this approach was becoming increasingly expensive and created production bottlenecks at Byers’s facilities.

“Bringing our tube-bending operations in-house greatly enhances our flexibility to meet complex shape requirements, tight delivery schedules and last-minute design changes – which is important for several of our customers in the processing sectors, such as nuclear power. It also enables us to broaden our range of fabrication services, which is critical for a subcontracting workshop like ours,” says Byers president Roger Byers.

He notes that Byers chose to buy a Unison machine based on the strength of its performance and the company’s reputation.

Byers operates a modern machine shop and is renowned for maintaining a pristine work environment. The company is dedicated to avoiding the type of hydraulic tube benders that are used by many fabricators, which are notoriously noisy and difficult to keep clean. It was also deterred by the difficulty of ensuring that accurate and repeatable results are obtained from hydraulic machines. Avoiding material wastage was another factor that deterred Byers from buying a hydraulic tube bender, as hydraulic tube bending often necessitates multiple trial runs before a part can be produced that meets specification.

Byers therefore chose to adopt all-electric CNC tube bending technology, which prompted the company to look at various manufacturers and to single out Unison’s machines as the best on the market. It also found that Unison was prepared to develop a bending solution to meet specific application needs.

The machine being delivered to Byers is a version of the 2" capacity CNC all-electric tube bender from Unison’s Breeze range, customised to enhance versatility of use. The machine features two independent bend heads that provide both left-hand and right-hand bending to accommodate the most complex shape requirements.

Further, the machine is capable of handling many popular tube and pipe sizes – including 1.5" Schedule 40 stainless steel stock with an outside diameter of 1.9". The machine bed is designed to accommodate tube lengths of up to 20 ft.

Additional specialist parts that Byers currently produces feature a variety of complex closely spaced bends, with radii as small as 60 mm. The Unison tube bender will enable the company to produce these parts efficiently and in a single uninterrupted machine cycle. Single-piece part fabrication will also help Byers to further increase the speed and efficiency of production by eliminating multiple cut-to-length and welding operations.

An additional advantage of the Unison machine is its fully automated, software-controlled setup. Byers produces parts in a range of batch sizes, even in single or very small quantities, so machine setup time has a major bearing on improving productivity. The machine that is being supplied to Byers can typically be reconfigured by a single operator in less than 15 minutes.

Moreover, to help enhance throughput and accelerate right-first-time parts production, both bend heads on the machine will be equipped with Unison’s unique laser-based spring-back measurement and correction system. This helps ensure bending precision by automatically compensating for the natural tendency of metal tubes to spring back slightly after being bent – eliminating costly scrap.

Meanwhile, Unison will supply Byers with a comprehensive control and support software package. In addition to Unison’s Windows-based Unibend machine control software, the package will include Internet-based remote diagnostics and video monitoring facilities, as well as a powerful Op2Sim three-dimensional tube-bending simulator.

The simulation software uses a computer aided design (CAD) model of the bending machine to generate detailed video imagery. It offers collision detection facilities, with user-adjustable parameters for real-world environmental factors, such as the distances between the tube centre line and the ceiling, floor and walls of the workshop. The software also has in-built artificial intelligence to reiterate bend cycles until a successful solution is found. The simulator will enable Byers to develop production-ready tube bending programs offline, without having to test and optimise them on the bending machine, saving valuable production time.

Edited by Samantha Herbst
Creamer Media Deputy Editor

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