Page 16 - MetalForming December 2012

Slitting Line Out;
Transfer Press In
A turnkey transfer line of four presses, servo- transfer system, quick- die-change apparatus, safety light curtains, roller and magnetic conveyors and scrap shakers transforms this steel- service center into a Tier Two automotive stamper.
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITOR
In 2005, Tier One automotive sup- plier Exedy Corp. asked its steel- service center, Kentucky Steel Cen- ter, to open a new service center right next door to its production facility in Mascot, TN (near Knoxville). Plans for that facility, named Tennessee Steel Center, included warehousing of steel coils and processing on a fully equipped slitting line.
You know what they say about best- laid plans, and at Tennessee Steel Cen- ter those plans took a sharp right-angle turn beginning in 2007. That’s when Exedy, in need of stamping capacity, asked the service center to forego plans to install a slitting line and instead install a blanking press. That 600-ton press, a Seyi model, was tasked with feeding Exedy’s stamping presses with blanks of 1- to 3.6-mm-thick steel (pri- marily HR400 and HR440), to support production of torque converters and other transmission components.
A Tennessee Steel operator prepares the four-press transfer line to stamp torque-con- verter supports, from 295-mm blanks of 2-mm-thick steel. The job requires seven press stations, so it runs in two setups—stations one through four run right to left, beginning with an automatic blank feeder; following a die change, the parts run in reverse through die stations five through seven, left to right.
Between stations one and two, the transfer system rotates the blanks 180 deg. and flips them over. Watch the line run, and get a look at the blank rotation-and-flip setup, at www.metalformingmagazine.com/multimedia.
14 MetalForming/December 2012
www.metalformingmagazine.com
The Plot Thickens
The plot thickened in 2010, when Exedy found it needed more than just blanking capacity—now it needed additional stamping capacity. Specifi- cally, it asked Tennessee Steel to support its production of torque-converter
stampings, by buying a transfer press to take on a set of dies being shipped across the pond from Japan.
“We looked at buying a transfer press, and it was too costly for what Exedy wanted us to do,” recalls Ivan Price, Tennessee Steel’s general man-