Machinery for fabricating structural steel have advanced over the past 100 years, from primitive handheld motor-driven drills and saws to sophisticated, automatic “thermal cutting” machines. These days, those considering acquiring new structural steel fabricating capability face an never before seen dichotomy in their “technology platform” choice that didn’t exist when they previously had to make such a choice: the established “drill, punch and saw” methods or the new “flame cutting” approach. The choice is one that must be considered from many viewpoints, based on both where the fabricator has been and where they want to go.
In the category of traditional “metal cutting metal” machinery, Ficep SpA of Varese – Italy is the industry leader in variety of machines and size of their business. The Ficep philosophy has been specialization – breaking the numerous different functions that are commonly done into distinct groups and then building machines focused on the different groups. The logical result has been families of equipment that specialize in performing distinct functions on distinct steel workpieces. This permits Ficep equipment to become highly efficient at the operations it is designed to perform. Such expressly optimized machines have clear benefits: if you have many bolt holes to make in numerous pieces of steel, you get it done fast. However, if you have multiple different features that must be performed on a piece, it must stop at different machines to have all those jobs done. That takes time and additional manpower to transfer the steel around the fab shop.
Only recently has a different approach to this equipment specialization philosophy emerged. The linchpin of this approach is using flame cutting via robot or other automated method to accomplish multiple fabrication tasks. In this case, the “flame” is the familiar plasma arc – long used to cut flat plate . The plasma cutter is in the “hand” of advanced industrial robot, which decides what and how to cut based on a cutting sequence made by sophisticated software. The complete system, known by the brand name PythonX, is the first of these structural fabrication machines. Early in its introduction (2005) the complaint against the PythonX plasma cutting system approach was certain operations – primarily making bolt holes – were somehow not done as well by thermal cutting as by metal-against-metal drilling. That concern has since been shown to be unfounded, since plasma cut bolt holes satisfy all industry requirements for both roundness and dimensional accuracy.
The reason the versatile “one machine does it all” philosophy of the new robotic plasma-cutting machines is so novel is simply that it involves just one machine, rather than 4 or 5. That single machine takes up substantially less floorspace and substantially less investment budget than the traditional multiple Special-purpose machine approach. Some believe that reductions in material handling are the strongest benefit of the PythonX approach. Because all operations can be done on one machine, there is vastly reduced need to transfer WIP from one machine to another, as is required in the multiple special-purpose machines philosophy of structural fabrication.
So which way is the better path to follow? The traditional path of deploying multiple fabrication machines, each optimized to be very fast and productive at a few limited functions? Or the new flexible “torch cutting” system having the capability to accomplish all the needed fabrication tasks on a single machine? The choice may not be as straightforward as you think. If you have 200 steel beams and have to cut them to length then make three bolt holes in each end, utilizing machines that are optimized for rapid hole drilling, like a beam drill line, and cut-to-length may be the best way to go. By contrast, if you have dozens of steel beams that require bolt holes, copes, flange flush cuts, notches and cut-to-length, you might want to have them all run on a single machine with no extraneous material handling. Each structural steel fabrication shop will adopt the path that best supports their business needs. The question is, if you could only have one machine type, what would it be?
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Compare Ficep machines to the new PythonX plasma beam drill line
