Unison to supply tube bending machines to Supercraft

UNISON has recently secured an order for tube bending machinery from precision aerospace engineering company Supercraft.

 

The order, which marks a breakthrough for Unison, comprises two machines. The company will provide Supercraft with another Evbend 1000 low-cost CNC tube bender, a novel machine that uses manually powered tube feed, rotation, and bending to reduce production costs for small-batch high-value parts, while ensuring precision through smart CNC-controlled braking on these axes. The Evbend machine was installed at Supercraft’s Brough facility last December.

 

Unison will also deliver a 30mm model from its Breeze family of all-electric tube benders during the first quarter of this year.

 

The machines will help Supercraft, a leading manufacturer of precision components and assemblies for military and civil aerospace companies, expand operations at its new manufacturing facility in Brough, U.K. This facility, which specializes in pipes and ducting for aircraft wings, is gearing up for contracts recently secured with major aerospace customers.

 

Supercraft will likewise leverage the flexibility of Unison’s software to enhance productivity of specialist low volume parts through use of ‘closed-loop’ manufacturing techniques.

 

The company initially sought to replace a first-generation Evbend 1000 tube bender that it has been using for about 30 years. The machine, which was developed by a tube manipulation specialist, has been particularly popular in aerospace and motor racing industries as it helps reduce cost production for low volume precision parts. General manager Owen Sexon said the company uses the machine to bend 5mm to 10mm tubes with a half-millimeter wall thickness, with many of the smaller diameter parts involving complex bend sequences and very small batch sizes.

 

Unison, which acquired the manufacturing and design rights to Evbend, has developed a new-generation version of the tube bender last year. This new version incorporates a powerful HMI and controller software designed for ease of integration into factory networks. This resolves the problem inherent with the original benders, which were standalone machines with limited I/O that hindered networking to Supercraft’s coordinate measuring machine (CMM).

The company’s Breeze 30 all-electric bending machine set for delivery to Supercraft this quarter also features a custom software interface for ease of integration with the latter’s CMM.
 
Supercraft’s automated bending machines in its Brough facility are networked to a central CAD/CAM resource, which includes an advanced laser-based CMM. The CMM uses nontactile laser measurement techniques to build detailed and highly accurate 3D computer models of bent parts. The measurements are typically taken from preproduction parts for process verification, and any necessary correction data is fed back to the bending machines. Measurements can also be obtained from customer-supplied parts and used for reverse engineering purposes. This allows customers to specify requirements in a wide variety of forms, including drawings, CAD models, files containing XYZ tube bending machine data, and master parts.

 

“We are really impressed by the quality, breadth and ease-of-use of Unison’s software,” Mr. Sexon said.

“It is leagues ahead of most of the tube bending software on the market. The fact that Unison was prepared to develop custom software and take responsibility for interfacing the new Evbend machine to our CMM made it an obvious purchase choice,” he added.