"A bespoke Unison twin head all electric CNC bending machine continues to outperform for the seat manufacturing firm, The Freedman Seating Company, expanding manufacturing capacity at its plant in Chicago," said a company spokesperson.
The Freedman Seating Company engineers and manufactures seats and seating related products for many different applications. Its product lines include bus, rail, marine, delivery truck, specialty and commercial vehicle seating.
Freedman's decision to search for a new tube bending machine was driven mainly by the nature of its seat products, including formed seat frames. The company wanted to replace its old hydraulic tube bender and its outdated software with state-of-the-art bending capabilities. It needed a tube bending solution that would reduce time-consuming set-up and increase reliability, repeatability and productivity. The Freedman Company needed to upgrade to an all-electric CNC tube bender to achieve its goals.
"The all-electric architecture provides significant benefits: a rapid and repeatable software-based set-up, lower energy consumption and reduced noise compared with traditional hydraulically powered bending machinery," said a company spokesperson. In addition to this, it sought a tube bending solution that had user-friendly software, was easy to program and offered 3-D simulation to improve accuracy and bend speed. To further optimize its process, Freedman needed a machine that could perform multiple bends at the same time.
Unison was one of the few manufacturers of all-electric, twin head, state of the art tube bending equipment. It designed and built a bespoke tube bending machine to meet The Freedman Seating Company's specific needs and expectations.
The Unison twin head bender software allows The Freedman Company to design complex tube shapes without generating cut off waste and enables them to double their productivity by using twin head bending technology. The fully automated tube bender with auto material loading and seam detection sensors also reduces material handling.
"The Unison staff is very knowledgeable, supportive, friendly and provides prompt responses to our service needs. We purchased our first twin head Breeze tube bender 17 years ago and added another Twin-head Unison bender seven years later. One of the many important qualities of these benders is the reliability and the consistency they provide our manufacturing process on a daily basis," said Shlomo Bar-Sheshet, Manufacturing Engineer, Freedman Seating Company.
"Compared to hydraulically-powered bending machines, the all-electric architecture of Unison's twin-head benders provides users with major cost-saving advantages. In addition to easier functional integration, faster set-up and more readily achievable bending consistency, the machines use considerably less energy. Significant power is only consumed during the bending operations, whereas hydraulic benders normally require the oil pump to maintain a pressure reserve, wasting energy. Tests conducted by Unison show that during bending operations, a twin-head all-electric machine only uses about 10% of the electricity needed by a comparable hydraulic bending machine. Further energy savings are also realized, because it is standard practice to heat or cool hydraulic oil to ensure bending consistency," said the spokesperson.
Unison twin-head bending machines have an all-electric architecture, with all motion axes controlled by servomotors. The standard machine configuration comprises two separate bending heads supported on independent ball screw driven linear carriages. A fifth axis controls a compact and fast actuating tube "center grip and rotate" unit, which can be mounted in a fixed position between the two heads or removed from the machine. The flexibility of this design facilitates production of either 2-D or 3-D parts and accommodates both symmetrical and asymmetrical parts.
The servomotor-driven center grip and rotate unit is compact and designed specifically to combine ease and speed of loading/unloading with a highly secure grip. It has a narrow profile, allowing close approach of the two bending heads.
For more information contact:
Stuart Singleton
Unison, Ltd.
500 Cane Creek Pkwy.
Ringgold, VA 24586
828-633-3189
sales@unisonltd.com
www.unisonltd.com