Technology Spotlight
By Tim Heston, Senior Editor
No matter how fast they become, cutting lasers still can’t form emboss- es, louvers, offsets, or anything else. An incredibly fast laser may make the cutting department more productive, but eliminating an entire
operation, like forming or tapping, may have an even more dramatic effect on
overall shop productivity.
Scratch me not
Laser/punch system’s turret does its job and gets out of the way
Historically, this is where the modern laser/punch combo machine—
the Swiss army knife of metal fabrication tools—has really made its mark.
But all that really doesn’t matter if
workpiece scratches force rework like
polishing, or worse, a scrapped part.
Table designs have evolved to suit.
Dirty roller ball tables can scratch
sensitive material easily, so more fabricators in recent years have moved to
brush tables. But as Tim Brady, product manager at Buena Park, Calif.-based Amada America, explained,
even these don’t eliminate scratching
potential entirely, particularly when
using form tools.
“For certain forming tools, the dies
stick up higher than the passline of
the material,” he said. “So the material
is dragged over these dies, which can
cause some serious scratching.”
This problem led to a feature that’s
on the company’s ACIES 2515T laser/
punch combination system. Intro-
duced to North America this year,
the all-electric system has a retract-
able die mechanism in the lower tur-
ret, which allows the lower turret to
reside beneath the brush table. When
a tool is selected, a small window in
the brush table opens up, almost
like a stage trapdoor, through which
comes the die. The die performs its
operation, then descends back below
the table, with the trapdoor closing
behind it.
“So when you’re forming, you bring
the tool up to perform the operation,
then drop it out of the way rapidly be-
fore moving the material to the next
forming position,” Brady said. “Then
you bring it up again to perform your
next form. This means when the ma-
terial is being transported, it’s not be-
ing dragged over the die.”
This also simplifies tool placement.
Traditionally, programmers have po-
sitioned forming tools away from
punching tools on the turret. “If you
have a punch next to a forming tool,
The die emerges from a retractable turret beneath the brush table to perform a punching
operation.
To avoid marring or scratching parts, the
system has a retractable turret below the
brush table.
See us at FABTECH
Booth #S513
