The Fabricator - August 2009

Situation E & E Mfg. recently decided to install a new press in its plant in Athens, Tenn. It soon became apparent that to make room for the heavy equipment hat would construct the press pit and install the press, an 80- by 120-ft. sec- tion of the plant would need to be re- engineered—including raising the roof. Resolution Craftsmen from The Steel Shop completed the roof-raising suc- cessfully and also designed, fab- ricated, and installed a mezzanine for the press controls and electrical service lines. Once the press was installed, the company lowered the roof back into the exact position it was prior to the construction. The company’s in-house staff of en- gineers designed and built an addition to the plant that included the installa- tion of columns and a roof truss system. The 15-month project was completed on time and within budget. The Steel Shop, 51825 Gratiot Ave., Chesterfield, MI 48051, 586-598-1390, tss@thesteelshop.net, www.thesteelshop.net Craftsmen raise roof on fabricator’s capabilities Blast line preps stocked materials to customer requirements Situation Delta Steel is a provider of components for oil rig platform applications and large sheets of steel for the shipbuild- ing industry. When the company opened a new facility in Morgan City, La., a few years ago, it needed a line for performing rust and scale removal and surface profiling on plate and structural shapes. also distributing steel products to cus- tomers in a time-sensitive manner, often within hours of placing an order. The machine is designed to blast steel plates up to 160 in. wide, 2 in. thick, and 60 ft. long. It also can blast and paint 42-in. I-beams with process times between 5 and 10 FPM. The steel enters the system on a roller conveyor that moves it through a station where it is preheated by a di- rect flame to remove water or moisture before blasting. The steel continues on the conveyor through the shotblast machine, where it is exposed to the abrasive blast from 12-bladed Target- Lok® direct-drive wheels for even dis- tribution of abrasive over the material. After shotblasting is completed, the steel enters an automatic paint booth where a dual filtering system paints the
steel with HVLP guns for water-base
paint or airless guns for solvent-base
primers. To ensure consistent paint spray
application, the paint systems use prod-
uct sensors to monitor and control the
paint spray gun operation. When paint-
ing is completed, the steel leaves the
paint booth and enters a drying tunnel
before exiting the line on a conveyor.

Wheelabrator Group, 1606 Executive Drive, LaGrange, GA 30240, 800-544-4144, www.wheelabratorgroup.com

Resolution

Delta installed a Wheelabrator® Preservation line. In addition to blasting the surface, the system applies a weldable, zinc-based primer coat of paint for corrosion protection before storage or subsequent manufacturing operations.

The line allows the company to clean and paint stocked materials per each customer’s requirements while

Disk lasers lead to new design options for carmaker

velop new design options. “Compared to conventional spot welds, full-length weld seams in car body manufacturing require less sheet folding and thickness because of a specific laser design, and thus save about 5 kg of weight per vehicle,” said Jean-Charles Schmitt,

product and process laser manager at PSA.

The four lasers used in production supply 10 processing stations, which the TRUMPF LaserNetwork, in turn, supplies with the necessary laser power for welding. “The LaserNetwork enables us to take advantage of the available power from the four disk lasers and achieve capacities of almost 100 percent,” said Schmitt. “With this network design, PSA does not need any backup laser source.

“In case of a problem,” he added, “we can easily switch the whole pool of stations on the three remaining sources, with little production loss.”

TRUMPF GmbH + Co. KG, P.O. Box 1450, 71252 Ditzingen, Germany, 49- 7156-303-31559, www.de.trumpf.com

Situation

PSA Peugeot Citroën, Sochaux, France, is launching the new Peugeot 3008® this summer.

In an effort to improve body stiffness and reduce sheet folding and thickness, the company decided to look beyond using individual spot welds to weld the doors and body reinforcements of the new vehicle.

Resolution

PSA now is using three TruDisk 6002 lasers and a TruDisk 4002 from TRUMPF with powers of 6 and 4 k W. The disk lasers lay a full-length weld seam, which contributes to high body stiffness in the automobile.