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FOLLOWING ON FROM the commissioning of four new BDM cutting and machining centres at a combined cost of £ 1.7million, TruFrame has now installed a new Urban welding and cleaning line that’ s already offering outstanding levels of product quality, accuracy and consistency and without any additional cost to their customers.
The new AKS 6910 / 8 VARIO has been specified with electrically driven servo motors on each of the welder’ s eight heads, which replaces the traditional arrangement of pneumatic cylinders that have been used on this sort of machinery for decades.
These‘ smart heads’ communicate with each other in real-time, allowing them to drive together at the same rate and with the same degree of force. This not only ensures that all frame and
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transom / mullion elements are welded in perfectly square, but additional controlled pressure at the final‘ squeeze’ point helps to improve overall joint strength.
The introduction of the new welder, with its cutting-edge technology, has also allowed TruFrame to further improve the visual appearance of all frame corner and transom joints by reducing the weld restriction from 2.5mm to just 0.2mm. The resulting‘ pencil-thin’ weld line on foiled product is a striking visual enhancement, which extends around the entire frame rebate due to the unique profile specific tooling which formed a large part of the entire investment.
The corner cleaning section makes up the second half of the new line and provides an enormous amount of additional manufacturing capacity. The SV
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800 / 4 automated CNC cleaning station is able to process four corner or transom joints in a single cycle time. The consistency of cleaning and final finish is improved with the use of Teflon-coated knives and bespoke cutter sets for processing odd-leg outer frames. Finally, the added automation through softwarecontrolled transfer tables reduces the potential for damage caused by manual handling.
TruFrame’ s two-year investment programme was
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planned from the outset to provide ample capacity for future growth, whilst also challenging the industry’ s accepted quality standards. With the project’ s completion scheduled for early 2019, when the second welding and cleaning line is delivered and commissioned, the company has been pleased with the early response garnered from customers.
www. truframe. co. uk
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