Automating Stainless Steel Tube Bending in Middle Earth

Ultibend Industries Ltd. (Porirua City, New Zealand) manufactures stainless steel tube fittings for sale to distributors in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S. who supply wineries, breweries, dairy factories, automotive exhausts and other car parts, and architectural handrails around New Zealand, California and Australia. As their business expanded, it became essential to upgrade their bending process and replace the original hydraulic bending machines they had developed in-house with modern, low maintenance and reliable all-electric tube bending machines that use software-controlled servo-motor bending. They purchased two customized all-electric tube bending machines from Unison Ltd. (Scarborough, England) to suit their proprietary manufacturing process and increase productivity for making fittings for food and beverage processing systems at their shop in Wellington. These machines automated the bending of tube fitting shapes such as elbows and U-bends in sizes from ½ in to 4 in diameter and significantly boosted their processing speed compared with the previous hydraulic systems.

“The software has been invaluable as opposed to our old hydraulic system. The safety feature written into the software make these machines much safer than the old benders,” noted Linc Turley, the director of Ultibend Industries. “These all-electric servo-driven machines give us greater control over bend parameters and increased accuracy to consistently meet standards. All of the pressure values, mandrel position and other data is captured and automatically adjusted to the correct position during setup, as opposed to manual adjustments, making setups and adjustments more straight forward so that lower-skilled employees can operate the equipment.” Once a size is set up, manual changes to the bend angle and pressure setting don’t have to be made as they did with the hydraulic benders. Electric servos increase flexibility in running these benders. They easily vary how far the clamps open for loading, alter the loading positions for 45 deg programs and less maintenance time is spent fixing hydraulic leaks. “Minor adjustments to the bender settings to get the required quality are a lot easier and faster via a program rather than having to manually adjust threads, saving us time on difficult jobs,” added Turley.

Ultibend Industries Ltd., 15 Raiha Street, Porirua City, New Zealand 5022, +64 4 237 4060, Fax: +64 4 237 4066, [email protected], www.ultibend.com.

Unison Ltd., Faroe House, Thornburgh Road, Scarborough, England YO11 3UY, +44 (0) 1723 5828 68, Fax: +44 (0) 1723 5823 79, [email protected], unisonltd.com.