Page 13 - MetalForming June 2009

choppers (one shown in photo), along with a conveyor, to chop and transport waste edge trim on the fly. Coordinated by a fre- quency drive that makes automatic adjustments, a stand accommodates material width while the chopper and con- veyor match slitter-line speed. Chopped scrap dumps directly into a storage hop- per inside the building, sparing the operator a 10-min. trip outside several times per day. Previously, an operator had to deposit bulky scrap balls in a 40-ft. container outside. And, because the chopped scrap is more highly valued than unprocessed scrap, scrap dealers pay more for it.
“We’re getting an extra $10 per ton for our scrap,” says Fleischmann. “The extra income, more than $10,000 per year, is an untapped resource that’s going straight to our bottom line.” Also, according to Fleischmann, the plant saves about 200 hr. of labor per year thanks to its new scrap choppers.
Another scrap-chopper success story comes from the Portland, OR, facility of Wayne-Dalton Corp. The garage-door manufacturer installed Sweed scrap choppers on its coil-processing lines to eliminate the need for operators to man- ually fold edge-trim scrap and toss it in a hopper. Changing coils and setup also was necessary when running narrow doors on the slitter line.
Mike Pfeiffer, a Wayne-Dalton super- visor, estimates saving at least 100 hours of labor per year in scrap handling. The system also enables a single coil size to be used for standard and narrower doors, eliminating the cost of keeping an extra coil size in inventory.
Sweed Machinery, Inc.: 866/507-3667; www.sweed.com
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