Putting one’s work on autopilot is tempting, but realistically, it’s a tad far-fetched. Or is it? For the CPO 315 RFA cold saw from Scotchman Industries, Philip, S.D., unattended production is its main function. The fully automatic roller feed saw allows the equipment operator to plug in a work order and walk away with the confidence that when he returns, the job will be done accurately.
And it’s not just the cutting function that’s fully automatic. "It has a complete loader where you place the tubing into the machine, set your desired length of cut and it’ll automatically load one tube after another into the machine," explains Mike Albrecht, cold saw product manager at Scotchman. "It’ll feed it through, do a trim cut off of each piece, if desired, and then it’ll cut each piece after that. It then ejects the tube off of the machine. It’ll cut every piece possible out of each tube and then will advance the next tube, cutting a trim off of it, separating the remnant and trim from the cut pieces, and all according to a desired number of cuts."
The standard CPO 315 RFA can perform all of those functions with ferrous or nonferrous material up to 60 inches in length--31/2 inches in diameter for round tube, 2 inches in diameter for round solids, 31/8 inches by 31/8 inches for square tube and 2 inches by 2 inches for square solids. If a customer needs to handle longer material, however, the saw can be customized with a longer feed table. Albrecht says that in addition to the 90-inch or 120-inch feeding tables that are available, the customization can be for shorter material, as well, such as in the case of those handling 12-foot aluminum tubing. "Nothing is standard," he says. "We can option out whatever a customer requires to fit their needs."
Cruise control
The customization options don’t stop there. The add-on equipment that’s available from the Scotchman line of cold saws also includes flood coolant, bundler loader magazines and in-line deburring units. The deburring unit, in particular, was what sold TW Metals Inc., Exton, Pa., on the equipment when it was on the hunt for something to take over the work that the company’s abrasive chop saw and lathe machine were handling.
"Most of our bottlenecks were with deburring on the abrasive saw, as well as the machine setup time with the lathe machine," says Mike Bantin, operations manager at TW Metals. "We were looking for something that was fully automatic; left very little, if any, burrs; and could hold tight tolerances."
The Scotchman saw was able to fulfill the scope of TW Metals’ requests. All CPO 315 RFAs have a length tolerance of ±0.006 inch, and with the incorporation of the deburring unit, TW Metals’ customers receive burr-free edges on their products.
"And it all depends on the customer and what they’re doing with the product," says Albrecht. "If you’re a customer that’s cutting tube and going into a welding process, they just need an accurate cut-to-length product. If it’s a finished product that comes out where the end product of the tube is handled by a customer or a consumer, then it needs to be deburred so that they won’t cut themselves on it. It all depends on the application and what’s being done with the tube. And TW Metals is a service center--they sell tube to anybody, whether it be bundles of 24-foot material or exact cut-to-length, and that’s obviously why they bought this machine. They needed to fill a variety of cut-to-length orders."
Although Scotchman doesn’t actually make the deburring unit, the company hand-picked it as a viable add-on that many of its customers, like TW Metals, have found as a way to extend their available value-added services. The Burrmaster deburring machine is manufactured by Kent Corp., North Royalton, Ohio, and integrates easily into the saw, creating a turnkey, automatic deburring system.
Turbulence-free ride
TW Metals, which was acquired by O’Neal Steel Inc., Birmingham, Ala., in 2005, is made up of a sophisticated network of service centers. It has facilities in 23 cities, spanning from Highway 1 all the way to the banks of the Atlantic. And each location serves an equally sophisticated group of customers. The type of materials required of those customers is as varied as the number of end products that those materials will eventually make up.
The service center carries rod, bar and wire; tubing in a full range of rounds, squares, rectangles and streamline products; and a complete selection of welded and seamless pipe, all of which can be processed on the Scotchman machine. "We’re mostly cutting stainless steel tubing, thin-wall from 0.02 inch to 0.065 inch, but we’ve also cut aluminum and solids, as well," says Bantin. "The best aspects of the saw are its easy setup and operation, low maintenance, minimal burrs on cuts and its fully automatic functioning."
For a company that doesn’t need to put its work on autopilot, Scotchman has a machine for that type of customer, too. "We have a full series of saws, starting with a manual saw," says Albrecht. "It has a manual clamp and a manual downfeed. We also have a semiautomatic machine where you step on the pedal and the saw clamps and cuts the material, but one that requires the operator to index the material to the length cut. This saw is the next step up to the fully automatic."
Albrecht continues, however, to describe the fully automatic saw as a piece of equipment that can tackle large-size orders with little effort on the part of the operator.
"If you have big runs, like 500 pieces, you can program 500 into the counter of the fully automatic saw, set your material in it and turn it on," he says.
And once those parts have been cut, no one can accuse the operator of sleeping at the wheel. MM
