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Brad Kuvin
Editorial Director

Feed Line—Fundamental to Transfer-Press Freshen-Up

May 1, 2016

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The sprawling 215,000-sq.-ft. Icon Metal Forming plant in Corydon, IN, has a long, rich history as a Tier One supplier to Ford and General Motors, among other OEMs. Once a family-owned operation, the plant’s timeline includes a 7-yr. stretch as Oxford Automotive. Acquired by Martinrea in 2005 and coined Icon (to serve as the “icon of manufacturing for the company,” says Icon general manager Kyle Kasey), plant management most recently has turned its attention to boosting output from its burgeoning pressroom.

Icon’s new feed line, installed on a 2000-ton transfer press, features a four-roll servo feeder to ensure optimum coil-feed accuracy, particularly beneficial when feeding higher-strength steels. The four-roll feeder, which provides twice the surface contact with half the air pressure of a two-roll feed, helps prevent slippage that can cause marking on the material or lead to inaccurate feed lengths.

“Work load and part volumes have climbed steadily over the last 12 to 18 months,” Kasey says. Much of that growth emanates from three major GM programs (Icon earned a 2015 GM Supplier Excellence Award) that have more than doubled the facility’s steel consumption—from 1 million to 2.1 million lb./week.

“We’re among the top-performing Martinrea plants,” Kasey says. “We’ve made numerous improvements to stabilize our production processes, increase the capacity of our existing equipment, and upgrade or replace aging equipment to improve throughput.”

Examples include the development of standardized robotic-welding cells, a commitment to quick-die change in the pressroom and, most recently, completely refreshing one of the company’s workhorse stamping lines, featuring a 2000-ton 15-yr.-old transfer press. Late in 2015, the press, whose transfer system recently was upgraded to all-servo, welcomed a new servo-feed coil line equipped to handle higher-strength steels.

Press Refresh Adds Speed, Versatility

Icon’s pressroom features three 2000-ton transfer presses, as well as eight progressive-die presses (150 to 1000 tons) and a seven-press tandem line (500-ton presses). A Komatsu transfer press installed in 2000 has been the most recent beneficiary of upgrade attention.

The 72-in.-wide wide 50,000-lb.-capacity feed line incorporates a hydraulic cut-to-length production shear with a blank destacker. The setup allows continuous coil, rectangular blanks or developed blanks to feed from the same system.

“That transfer line originally was designed to stamp mild-steel blanks, produced on one of our progressive presses,” says production manager Tom Roth. “With this recent upgrade project, initiated late in 2014, we sought to enable the press to process high-yield-steel coils, including advanced high-strength steels, using progressive dies. At the same time we wanted the line to be able to produce blanks inline, and destack and feed the blanks to the transfer system.”

Fast forward to August 2015 and we find the transfer press in full-out production mode with its newly installed Tri-Function feed line from Cooper-Weymouth Peterson (CWP), Clinton, ME. The 72-in.-wide, 50,000-lb.-capacity feed line incorporates a hydraulic cut-to-length production shear and a blank destacker. The setup allows continuous coil, rectangular blanks or developed blanks to feed from the same system. It’s freed up one of Icon’s progressive-die presses from having to produce blanks, adding capacity to the company’s pressroom.

The feed line also features a servo-driven magnetic runout conveyor that transfers blanks created in the cut-to-length mode into the transfer press. The conveyor, with a 24-in. adjustment into the press, also can feed developed blanks.

CWP outfitted the line with a four-roll servo feeder to ensure optimum coil-feed accuracy. “When we worked with CWP to spec the line,” says Roth, “we had to prepare for stamping higher-strength steels, which represented a growing proportion of the new working coming in. That includes dual-phase materials. The four-roll feeder, which provides twice the surface contact with half the air pressure of a two-roll feed, ensures that we minimize or eliminate any slippage that can cause marking on the material or lead to inaccurate feed lengths.”

Also included in the line is a coil car, holddown peeler system and two-axis servo pick-and-place destacker.