Page 26 - MetalForming August 2013

Fabricators Gain an Edge
repair gigs he cut his teeth on when he launched the firm in 1990, in a 50- by 50-ft. rented building. Today, Curtis Welding calls a 13,500-sq.-ft. shop home, outfitted with a 250-ton 14-ft. press brake, 120-ton ironworker, a ver- tical saw, 7.5-ton overhead crane, a bevy of welding equipment and its new 8.5- by 25-ft. accu-kut/Hypertherm PAC machine.
Renaud runs mostly 1⁄4-in. mild-steel
plate (extending to 2 in. in some cases) and 24-gauge stainless steel through his accu-kut. The machine landed on his shop floor in March 2012 after he researched the technology at the Fabtech 2011 tradeshow in Chicago. Before then, plate cutting, weld prep and holemaking occurred on a 2008- vintage 6- by 12-ft. plasma-cutting table Renaud calls “entry level.” It replaced an old oxyfuel-cutting table, “and
brought in a ton of money for me,” says Renaud, “paying for itself in just a few months. But as the size of the jobs we began to bid on kept getting larger and larger, I decided we had to upgrade to the 25-ft. PAC table.”
Renaud, like Kerstetter, appreciates the Hypertherm True Bevel and True Hole technology—“Our customers, particularly those in the wastewater industry, love the hole quality we pro- duce,” he says. And, he boasts of now being able to work with 8- by 20-ft. plates and avoid weld-splicing smaller sections. “We’ve eliminated beveling as a secondary process—either manu- ally or automated. And we’re saving hundreds of hours of production time while improving accuracy, so that fitup and welding in the field becomes eas- ier for our customers,” Renaud adds.
Comparing his new PAC setup to the previous version, Renaud also notes the dramatically decreased piercing time—from 2 sec. per pierce on average before to as little as a few milliseconds now. And plenty of his work requires a considerable amount of piercing.
“One recent job,” Renaud shares, “required processing 51 sheets of 8- by 20-ft., 3⁄8-in.-thick steel plate, each with 429 holes. That’s a production job we could never have quoted before. We couldn’t compete.”
What about etching? Here, Renaud tunes down amperage to the machine’s 260-A cutting head to 10 A, and etches bend lines onto plate sections to ease downstream operations.
“For example,” says Renaud, “we might have to weld 40 gussets to a plate. By plasma-etching the layout right onto the plate, the fitter doesn’t even need to use a tape measure to lay out the assembly.”
Describing another etching appli- cation, Renaud notes the great deal of plate rolling performed at the shop. This work requires prebending the plate ends before inserting it into a rolling machine. “We plasma-etch those bend lines,” he says, “which speeds the layout process and mini- mizes or eliminates any chance for error during layout.” MF
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MetalForming/August 2013
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