Page 12 - MetalForming June 2009

Metals/Coil Processing
Red Bud Installs Lines at Nucor, ArcelorMittal
A new 3⁄8-in. capacity cut-to-length line has hit the production floor at the Nucor Corp. building-system’s facility in Brigham City, UT, and a new precision blank- ing line has begun production at the ArcelorMittal processing plant in Sterling Heights, MI, both courtesy of Red Bud Industries, Red Bud, IL. Nucor’s 75-in.-wide cut- to-length line produces steel sheet to 30 ft. long, from coils to 50,000 lb., for metal- building components.
ArcelorMittal’s new blanking line processes coils to 60-in. dia. and 40,000 lb., and includes a dual-motor grip-feed system, flatness inspection table and a Machine Concepts corrective leveler with AutoFlat shape correction.
Red Bud Industries: 800/851-4612; www.redbudindustries.com
Better, Safer Scrap Handling During Edge Trimming
and employs scrap choppers to handle slitter-line edge trim safely, while improv- ing safety, productivity and scrap value.
“Using scrap choppers (from Sweed Machinery, Gold Hill, OR), we produce more and do so more safely, while pro- viding better service to our customers,” says plant manager Anthony Fleischmann. “The choppers boost the value of our scrap and almost completely automate our edge-trim handling.”
Before investing in new scrap chop- pers, the scrap winder at the Precoat Met- als’ Birmingham plant created a bottle- neck at its high-volume slitter-line operation. Not only did the operator have to manually thread the edge-trim scrap into the winder at the start of every coil processed, but also each time the scrap thread would break. This caused production downtime to rethread the edge trim into the scrap winder.
To alleviate the bottleneck, the com- pany installed a pair of Sweed scrap
Fabricators slitting continuous lengths of coiled sheetmetal to size strive to improve the efficiency of their scrap-han- dling operations related to edge trim. Scrap winders, for instance, expose operators to sharp, fast-moving edge trim, while requiring frequent handling and monitoring, plus production-line stoppage to change out heavy, awkward
scrap balls. Manual handling of such scrap can be even more labor intensive and potentially hazardous.
A safer, more efficient way to handle slitter-line trim: scrap choppers at the point of generation, as evidenced by Precoat Metals at its site in Birmingham, AL. Precoat Metals supplies coating services for coils of flat-rolled stock,
10 METALFORMING / JUNE 2009
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