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Jason Crowell can remember the days when his shop bought 12-foot press-brake tooling. The company would cut it with a band saw down to size, then label it, say "3/8," named for the punch's 3/8-inch bearing surface, or width of the working part of the punch. A few months later the shop would order another 12-foot section, only this time the punch height would be off a little, so the shop would label it as being a variation of the first, "3/8-1."
"Soon, we'd have -1s, -2s, -3s lying all over the place," Crowell says. The shop wanted to move away from that, to lasso in tool organization, quicken tool change-outs and overall setups.
As vice president of American Metal Fab in Three Rivers, Mich., Crowell sought to streamline the press brake department. Although classified as a job shop, the company has several long-standing customers, so the floor has elements of a product-line manufacturer. Many customers are in the office-furniture business, a sector that tends to require sharp radii. Hence, bottom bending dominates, though the company performs a fair amount of acute air-bending.
The shop's core mission remains to stay a contract fabricator offering a gamut of services, from prototyping to sheet-metal cutting and welding, to bending and progressive-die stampings. With this in mind, Crowell sought to streamline work processes while keeping flexibility. Here, the press-brake department saw major revamps in two principal areas: tool organization and utilization.
Getting Organized
About six years ago, "finding the right tool used to be a hunt," Crowell says. An operator would look for tooling in four separate areas, then dig up a sample that could be one of multiple places. In the press-brake work area were jury-rigged toolboxes that stored various tooling combinations.
"You wouldn't believe how much time people waste looking for tools," says Pat Campbell, press brake tooling division manager for Wilson Tool International, White Bear Lake, Minn.
Today, tools for all of the company's 10 brakes, which range from 60 to 240 tons, are organized in a central setup station, away from the equipment. Workers take the job order to the setup station, which has an area where they can unfold the entire print. Setup sheets, organized in books, tell workers exactly what tooling to choose. All tools needed for a setup are placed on one of three mobile tool carts (basically cabinets on wheels). They place the tools on the cart and wheel it over to the brake.
At the machine, operators call up the program number (ready to go, thanks to offline programming). A tape-measure permanently attached above the brake bed shows "0" for the middle, then up to 6 feet (depending on bed length) to the left and right. "The setup sheet tells them exactly where the tooling goes," Crowell says, "every time." Such simple, common-sense thinking has helped dramatically speed setups and simplify training.
Yet tooling organized in cabinets and wheeled over to the machine only brought American Metal Fab halfway to its efficiency goals. Tooling technology helped the rest of the way.
The Tooling Quick-Change
Press brakes can be responsible for a heap of bottlenecks. Consider a box requiring multiple tools, from a 30 degree hemming punch and die, 60-degree punch and die, a 90-degree punch and die, and so on. "In a typical scenario, you have to load one punch and die that mate together, perform that bend, then remove the tooling and place new tooling in," says Wilson Tool's Campbell.