Yardney Water Purification Systems is a manufacturer water filtration equipment for that agricultural, food, municipal and HVAC industries. Within the 1960s, the corporation developed equipment to enable farmers within the rich growing parts of Southern California to take out sand, silt, grit, algae along with other contaminants in the water supply. To date, wire cutters has evolved a lot more than 100,000 standard and custom engineered water purification systems due to its various customers.
Manufacturing of these systems starts by manufacturing three- to four-foot diameter pressure vessels from steel or stainless-steel, with holes in order to connect pipes which will move water throughout the filtration unit. A variety of pipes with holes must be cut before all the pieces can be welded together then painted.
Chris Phillips, v . p . and general manager from the Riverside, California-based company, says Yardney realizes its manufacturing processes need to be as efficient since the water filtration systems it produces.
Recently, the company determined its existing plasma pipe cutting machine wasn’t giving the requisite throughput or cut quality. It had two major shortfalls. First, there wasn’t an easy way to load and unload pipes into and from the machine, which caused a production bottleneck. Second, it left quite a bit of slag that would have to be manually ground off of the pipes ahead of welding operations. Furthermore, the machine was experiencing increasingly frequent mechanical and electrical issues, contributing to high service costs and downtime.
Yardney considered various CNC plasma pipe-cutting options, ultimately choosing two Roto Hornet 1000 machines from Retro Systems with QuickPipe parametric pipe-cutting software, Hypertherm Maxpro200 air and oxygen plasma systems, and pneumatic pipe-handling systems.
The machines offered a variety of advantages on the previous equipment. The Maxpro200 plasma cutting system, when combined with Roto Hornet’s improved motion control, leaves behind basically no slag. This minimizes the amount of manual grinding found it necessary to prepare pipes for subsequent welding operations. Positioning speed is 1,200 ipm in comparison to 100 ipm with all the previous equipment. Plus, an efficient fume extraction system captures smoke at the purpose of the cut so that it does not contaminate the store-keeping the company in compliance with California Quality Of Air Management District regulations.
Every one of these features have made it possible for Yardney to produce a comprehensive variety of pneumatic wire strippers inside an efficient amount of time. Some cuts, like pipe notch cuts that might have taken four hours using the old system, are actually completed in only five minutes.
Programming is simpler compared to previous equipment’s DOS-based software, too. The QuickPipe parametric CAM software with graphical ui (GUI) enables the user to configure various end types and intersection types being cut, including straight, miter, cope, slotted and branch cuts. The prior equipment didn’t offer several cut shapes, so some shapes had to be cut manually. To program a new job, an individual selects a pipe diameter and wall thickness, defines the “end 1” and “end 2” cuts (for each and every pipe end), and defines any intersecting pipes per their location and orientation. NC code is automatically created from that information.
The corporation also discovered that Retro Systems’ pneumatic pipe-handling system enabled operators to quickly and safely load and unload pipe to maximize production. Staging racks 04dexspky full-length pipe and cut parts. As opposed to loading just one single pipe at one time, the business can load a lot of money of five to six pieces right away. Pneumatically adjustable steel wheels improved pipe-handling efficiency and provided the versatility to manage pipe including 1 to 14 inches in diameter while extracting smoke throughout the chuck.
Mr. Phillips is satisfied with the benefits this cable strip crimp machine offers. He strongly advocates taking the time to evaluate one’s current manufacturing processes in light of changing technology. “You have to purchase your organization to stay profitable,” Mr. Phillips says. “We’ve been doing that over the past fifty years, and that we intend to utilize that strategy in which to stay business for a long time into the future.”