Page 88 - MetalForming October 2019

FABRICATION
New Life for an Old Saw
Thanks to an upgraded motion-control system, an aging billet saw now holds incredibly tight tolerances, eliminating a potential source of wasted aluminum and reducing downtime for maintenance.
BY RICK MEYERHOEFER
The effect of machine-component obsolescence can be significant, even if the component itself still functions correctly. Consider, for exam-
Rick Meyerhoefer is international sales manager at Delta Computer Systems Inc., Battle Ground, WA; www.deltamo- tion.com.
This aging billet saw at Catalina Cylinders sports a new electrohy- draulic motion controller that enables the machine to hold a tolerance of ±0.001 to 0.003 in. when cutting aluminum billets to size.
ple, a case where a manufacturer/sup- plier lacks support documentation, or perhaps its staff at the factory is not available to help. In these cases, it can take a long time to resolve a problem, one that may not have been difficult to deal with when the component was new.
A recent case in point: a large 30-
in. cold saw used to fabricate high- pressure gas cylinders at Catalina Cylin- ders Inc., Garden Grove, CA. The billet saw processes 20-ft. lengths of Type 6061 aluminum stock, in diameters as large as 10 in. Feeding and advancing the stock into the saw, which cuts the billets into 4- to 16-in.-long pieces, rests on the back of an aging feed
86 MetalForming/October 2019
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