Page 70 - MetalForming October 2012

Automated Panel Bending
Picks Up Where Lean Leaves Off
Growth for this Chicago- area sheetmetal fabricator comes via speedy, flexible and automated panel bending, freeing up a new trio of CNC press brakes to take on heavier-gauge production as well as meeting rising demand for prototype development.
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITOR
A look down the throat of QFI’s new automated panel bender provides a close-up look at the segmented upper blankholder tooling and lower counterblade tools, as the rota- tor (top left) mounted to the blank manipulator prepares to place a drawer blank in front of the press.
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Lean manufacturing at its core simply means eliminating, or at least minimizing, wasteful or non-value-added processes and pro- cedures. On the non-value-added list: Machine setups, a necessary yet waste- ful evil. While metalformers can’t elim- inate setups altogether, they certainly can minimize the time taken between production runs to set up new jobs.
At metal fabricator Quality Fabri- cators Inc. (QFI), Addison, IL, lean has been the name of the game for the last several years, and setup-time reduc- tion has been a key lean initiative. As the firm’s order quantities have shrunk for the sheetmetal enclosures, carts, drawers and similar products it fabri- cates, its managers and engineers have retaliated by taking steps to slash setup times. We’re talking offline program-
ming of CNC press brakes, real-time bend-angle detection adjustment and other techniques targeted at minimiz- ing operator intervention (wasteful) and optimizing overall equipment effectiveness (value added).
Lean’s Great, But How to Handle Double the Order Quantities?
QFI’s lean focus did wonders for throughput and productivity, but when orders recently increased for one of its key product lines, a fresh look at sheet- metal-forming technology was in order. The job in question for the 124,000- sq.-ft. 100-person shop, which serves the oil processing, medical, military, computer, electronics and other indus- tries: fabrication of enclosures.
“We now make tens of thousands of enclosures annually,” says Victor