Steel Spin
Latest Trends in Steel Fabrication Equipment
Buildings from pre eng metal buildings pre-eng steel buildings to large skyscrapers call for someone to cut, drill, bend and join the steel “lumber” involved. This work is done at a structural steel fabrication shop, because the work is performed on a contract-by-contract basis for many different builders.
The typical structural steel fabrication firm must accomplish the equivalent tasks as a carpenter – sawing and drilling, but the workpiece to be sawed or drilled might weigh close to a ton or more, and they won’t be using many hand tools. The steel sections – I beams, H beams, plate, channel, hollow structural tube – are transported through the shop utilizing cranes and conveyors. They are transferred between different workstations where a variety of “shaping” tasks are performed – sawing and drilling and one called “beam coping” for which there is not a comparable task in the woodworking world, as there is in the structural steel fabrication world. Let’s examine these steel fabricating tools:
Drilling is carried out by a beam drill linebeam drill line. On a beam drill line, a large strauctural beam or channel is moved on a conveying table to position it laterally with a drilling head. The drilling head can either move in an up-and-down plane to drill into the flange of the I beam or in a side-to-side plane to drill into the web. The carbide drill bits spin at thousands of revolutions per minute to make holes very quickly.In some instances, the bandsaw function and the CNC beam drill line function are combined into a single large workstation. It’s done this way since the two functions are done on most structural steel sections, so merging them saves space over two separate machines.
A structural steel plate machine is a big worktable upon which a thick slab of steel can be placed horizontally and worked on. The function is frequently basic drilling, similar to a beam drill line, but often different large shapes are produced, so a cutting torch is used.
The beam coping machine is not always a machine in the normal sense. A coping tool may simply be a hand-held oxy-fuel or plasma are cutting torch where the operator cuts along a pattern marked out on the structural steel. The most common cut made is a “cope” – a cut out section of an end portion of a structural steel beam that, if left in place, would interfere with another part of the structural framing. Since coping is so popular, the handheld coping torch has been automated, conveying the workpiece into a panel-walled box and attaching the cutting torch to the wrist of an industrial robot so it can be moved steadily and with great accuracy.
In recent years, this concept of the robotic coping has been extended to the various other structural steel fabrication jobs, producing a line of versatile all-in-one structural fabrication models. These machines don’t use any friction metal cutting technologies at all – only a thermal cutting torch. Plasma arc is the preferred torch type because of its flexibility, speed and accuracy.These structural steel plasma cutting machines convey the steel beam into a work envelope in which the plasma torch robotic arm can make a complete cross cut and make bolt holes. This replicates the capabilities of the bandsaw and the beam drill line. It can then make notches, slots, circles or any other feature, thus carrying out the capabilities of a structural plate machine.
And, of course, the plasma cutting machine can make every kind of cope cuts.
These versatile plasma cutting systems for structural fabrication are an exciting new capability for the structural fabricator. But they are turning out to be more and more popular, as they can duplicate the functions of the four machine discussed above with one single machine that accomplishes all the required structural steel fabrication processes.
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I know of the recent book “Collins Class Submarine Story: Steel, Spies and Spin”. I wonder if binding ……..
agreements were replaced by non-binding agreements. Am puzzled because why wouldn’t a turnkey system have been ordered and delivered ?
maybe they didn’t have enough money left for that
great steel wool/fire spinning
