Page 31 - MetalForming Magazine May 2022

Fabrication: Press Brake’s Automatic Tool Changer
One way in which the new Amada press brake helps to down-skill operations at Diamond Metal Products: The graphical interface on the controller displays each move in the bend sequence to help guide the operator during multi- stage bending.
magazine based on the part-bending program uploaded into the machine con- trol from the engi- neering office. As the machine requires cus- tom tooling to enable automatic tool changes, Diamond Metal Products ordered all new tool- ing for the HRB 1003 ATC, “after Amada came in and looked at the types of jobs we’d be running through it. Right now, about 90 percent of what we fabricate can run on that machine as cur- rently outfitted with tooling, and we still have some allowance
remaining to add more tooling. The ATC is about 75-percent full. But being at 90 percent is huge for us, even if we don’t yet run that much work through the press brake.”
One additional benefit of the ATC touted by Pahl: setup repeatability. Operators manually loading tooling may not place the tooling in exactly the same place along the machine bed from one setup to the next, Pahl says. “That affects part-dimension repeata- bility,” he explains. “Now when we pro- gram a job, we know with certainty that the ATC will load and position the tooling repeatedly in the brake time after time.
“If I were starting a metal-fabrica- tion shop from scratch, I would have no problem launching production with this ATC brake,” Pahl adds, “especially when expecting to take on a lot of short-run work. The ATC is a game changer.” MF
28 MetalForming/May 2022
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