Steel supply centres, structural steel and fabricators have unique material handling requirements that sheet metal fabricators don’t.
Moving long heavy material can be very time-consuming and dangerous. Retrieving the necessary material and moving it to the saw can often exceed the actual cutting time. Never the less, material handling often remains an afterthought when investing in a new saw.
Traditionally Australian fab shops utilise a combination of gravity roller tables and/or overhead cranes to move material into the saw with fine adjustments or turning of material often done manually. In the more sophisticated shops, the roller tables might be motorised, but this is still the minority in our experience.
In most shops, the operator needs to run the machines and advance and stage material plus discharge the cut parts to appropriate locations.
It is easy to imagine how quickly this methodology loses efficiency when operators share a limited number of overhead cranes, and new stock can’t be advanced, staged and sawn until the last cut part has been removed. Consequently, right when a shop is under the pump to get beams cut and despatched to the next process, the saw itself is standing idle.
We are finding at Power Machinery more and more shops trying to get away from using overhead cranes to move steel through the shops.
The challenge is to find cost-effective solutions that can evolve and adapt to the workshops’ current requirements and have the flexibility to grow and expand as their business matures.
Power Machinery and MEP can help tailor a solution to your requirements once we understand the following parameters.
- Typical stock length
- Maximum and minimum material dimensions
- Maximum and minimum cut part length and the most common sizes.
- Maximum stock weight.
- Is pack cutting required?
- Volume
MEP and Hydmech systems are designed to be modular with each 1.5m or 3.0m roller table capable of being motorised or non-motorised. Each has individual variable drive speed units, therefore there is no need to link multiple tables with a shared chain drive. This affords much more modularity and the possibility of walkthrough or drive through spaces between tables.
Roller tables can be non-motorised or motorised or a combination of the two. Control can be either be with a joystick control or programmable via a PC based control station.
Each table is predisposed to accept a range of accessories either now or in the future. Possibilities upgrades include motorised cross transfers, staging skids on the infeed or outfeed, vertical rolls, manual or motorised length measuring systems or hydraulic squaring vices, just to name a few.
Contact us now to discuss how we can improve your material handling.