As you know (or don’t know) we deal with tube bending tools for CNC tube bending machines and tube fabrication consulting. And we think that the first free advice that we can give — customer should understand the machine or equipment he needs and range of the investments. Why is important? He has small production or workshop and will send the request for his drawing to CNC tube bender. Could get the quotation but he will never return the investment of the machine purchase so this request is useless for machine maker and the customer itself. Moreover you cannot imagine how qualified the world of manual tube bending so if we are talking about just several pieces people can do so on any very simple machine. Even if it is a hard bend there are a lot of solutions like sand filler, annealing of tube with flame during the bending and other technics. So it is important to all to tell to the customer where to go and I believe we can recommend him some Italian trademarks just for free.
The next story — even with the machines there are a lot of opportunities from mandreless single bend machine till complete CNC bender. And the price range could be from 5000 till 500 thousand of EUR or more. And as we told everything values from the application of the customer and the productivity he wants till the geometry of final parts and it’s repeatability. Moreover customer should count that probably some pieces is just more easy to make somewhere outside than to buy the machine.
What is tube bending?
Tube bending — is the special and professional controlled process of tube deformation to bend to the desired radius and angle. Bended tube line or pipeline is used in a lot of different applications from simple rails till complicated aircraft tube assemblies. Tube bending is made with different types of tools and special equipment and machine tools from handy devices for small copper tubes till the big bending machines for bending of tubes for shipbuilding or energy industry.
Let us say for customer is important also to understand the level of his request. If he wants to bend tube 200 mm the discussion of the machinery will be anyway with several hundred thousands of EUR. Even making of these parts with small quantities as the order outside could be very expensive with induction bender, but with cold bending it requires also very expensive bending tooling. Sometimes customer doesn’t understand these basics and it effects the additional useless work from a lot of sides where asked the offer. Moreover if we are talking about the production the planning should be not just active but for several years to understand the real flow of investments and possibilities of return.
To optimize the part geometry
Next free advice from us — any application for tube bending should be more universal and this means to make as less different radiuses as possible or to leave not more than one bending radius for the part. This can save a lot of money — each bending tooling is unique — it means that it is made for your tube and your sizes. Investments for tooling should be big and where is possible to unify the tube (simple parts like tubes for furniture, rails, handles etc.) engineer should do it.
Our experience that based on the application we can from the start to tell the technologies that the customer needs (at least how it is done in the real production). It can save the time and moreover make our consulting more solid and valuable.
What is the reason to take external consulting? Let us say — tube bending is standalone process and it is not very similar to other production processes. To involve from the beginning it is necessary to give for your engineer more complete other knowledge and moreover to study the actual market. Meanwhile it is necessary to take into the consideration a lot of things and moreover to study how to act — to search the equipment for your parts design or to adapt the design for the new possible equipment. Together with the tube bending there are a lot of additional processes from the cutting till the painting and marking. In the serious application such as aerospace tubing, automotive or standard high pressure hydraulics moreover we can recommend the solutions based to the actual world production standards for the industries.
This post is also published on @Medium
