Pressing the right buttons

Continuing with its strategy of investment in technology, sheetmetal profiling subcontractor Carlton Laser Services (CLS), has placed an order worth £750,000 for three high performance Easy-Form series CNC pressbrakes from LVD, bringing its spend to a total of £2 million over the last three years on investment in technology.

Realising the need to address an increasing demand for high quality, small batch, short leadtime components, CLS' representative's selected LVD equipment as the best technology to solve current and future sheet metalworking challenges.

Mohan Jassi, operation director for Carlton Laser, explained: “We knew we needed to ‘de-skill' the bending process on complex components in batch quantities ranging from 1 to 100 off so we set out to find machinery that had the best bending technology within the machine.”

Headed up by Mr Jassi and Carlton's founder Dennis Kent, the team at Carlton embarked upon a six month investigation of potential suppliers, technology and machines, which consisted of supplier audits, the extensive testing of equipment and technology using test parts developed by Carlton, and visits to machinery users.

A final evaluation included bending trials in which assessments were made for ease of use, offline programming capability, pre-production set-up time, production time, and accuracy of parts.

Mr Jassi commented: “Our task was to identify the best pressbrake and supporting technology on the market and we conclusively found that LVD's bending technology and the Easy-Form Laser in process angle correction system outperformed all of the competition. In fact, the parts produced by LVD with Easy-Form were exceptionally accurate and within our target of ±0.4°.

“Carlton's key consideration was the ability to efficiently process small to medium size batches,” he continued. “From seeing how LVD's Easy-Form system performed during the trials we are more than confident that the first part will be the right part and this in turn will effect considerable cost savings through reduced set-ups and production times and waste reduction.”

The three new machines and accompanying LVD CADMAN offline software are due to be delivered and commissioned in the near future.

LVD
www.lvdgroup.com Carlton Laser Services
www.carltonlaser.co.uk