STRUCTURAL STEEL FABRICATING MACHINERY
If you're a small producer, structural steel fabricating equipment may mean a bandsaw, a handheld cutting torch and drills - lots of drills and drill presses. Little automation . . . lots of labor.
But whether you're a large or small fabricator, structural steel fabricating machinery is coming to mean something entirely different: a single machine that serves all your steel beam fabrication needs, with total automation and incredible productivity. It's the robotic, CNC plasma cutting wonder machine called PythonX.
SQUEEZING THE COST
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Structural Steel Beams and
Other Materials
With the wide variation in size, shapes and required features, it seems unlikely you could use a single machine to fabricate all your structural steel. It was until the arrival of PythonX.
Can Tekla Software Really Control Fab Machinery ?
Structural steel design software has a lot of functions and new capabilities. But is controlling structural steel fabrication equipment one of them. Well, in
a surprising way it is, and it works very well.
Structural Steel Plasma
Cutting
For structural steel fabricators, plasma cutting once meant plate cutting and little else. They're starting to use plasma to cut beams, channel, angle, HSS
and, naturally, plate and bar.
PythonX Beam Drill Line
is replacing the standard beam drill lines like Ocean Avenger or Voortman's V630. Why? It does so much more than any beam drill line. It also copes, notches, scribes, bevel cuts and more.
New Beam Coping Machine
"Robots" for structural steel are not particularly new, and they have not been particularly useful for many of the other tasks to
be performed in a fab shop.
PythonX changes that, because it's much more than a coper.
Meet The New Generation of Super-Productive Structural Steel Fabricating Machinery
You've got to cut off 24 thirty foot I beams to size, drill 12 bolt holes in all of them, cope both ends of half of them, cut 36 angle clips – each with four bolt holes, burn out six large connector plates with a dozen bolt holes plus piece marks on each. Sounds like your bandsaw, beam drill line, angle line, burning table and marking machine will be busy for quite a while. Not to mention all your operators, layout men and material handlers. Is this really the best way to run a fab shop?
Not anymore. The newest generation of structural steel fabrication machinery lets you run this entire project on one single machine. You'll need one operator, one material handler, no measuring or layout and no changing out drill bits or saw blades. PythonX is a fully CNC robotic plasma cutting system that makes traditional structural steel fabricating equipment obsolete . . . and can make your fab shop 500% more productive.
Sound complicated? It's actually simpler than what you're probably doing now. The PythonX machine control can read part detail files generated by programs like Tekla, SDS/2 and StruCad and use them to automatically lay out the most efficient cutting sequence for the workpiece. No operator programming needed. In one pass, the PythonX high-definition Hypertherm plasma torch performs all cut offs, copes, marking, hole/slot drilling, notching, flange flush cuts, weld prep bevel cuts and miter cuts needed for beam, channel, angle, HSS or plate.
- "Anglemaster"
- CNC Bandsaw
- Burning Table
- Plate or Bar Line
- Marking Machine
- Coping Torch/Robot
- CNC Beam Drill Line
Saving Floorspace, Labor, Material Handling . . .
It's All About Saving Money
Since one Pythonx replaces multiple traditional fabrication machines (see box at left), it requires much less floorspace, while eliminating the manpower and tooling needed to run and maintain those other machines. PythonX also eliminates material handling to move a steel beam from one traditional machine to another (beam drill line to coping torch). Elimination of material handling reduces the non-skilled labor content of your shop.
An investment in PythonX pays of fast, because it is fast, accurate and always busy:
- Done running beams? Run channel. Finish channel? Load up HSS, plate or angle.
- It fabs parts 5 - 10 times faster than manual, so your shop becomes 5 times faster.
- With pinpoint accuracy and no manual programming, PythonX eliminates mistakes.
Can One Single PythonX Really Replace An Entire Fab Shop of Traditional Equipment?
PythonX handles a greater variety of structural sections and sizes than any conventional single-purpose fabricating machine. From large W36x300 beams down to 3"x3" angle, it typically processes 95% of a structural fabrication shop's material requirements.
PythonX can pierce material up to 1.25" thick for holes and slots. It can edge cut material up to 2" thick for cut-to-length, copes and notches.
On thick column sections where a traditional bandsaw may "wander" through the cut and start to break off teeth, PythonX gives you perfectly square cuts that easily meet an 80%+ bearing requirement.
Accuracy is sometimes difficult to achieve with traditional fabrication equipment. Not so with PythonX. It produces parts that are within 1/32" (0.8 mm) tolerance over their length, and it holds that tolerance over time because the positional repeatability of the robot arm is actually 0.0026" (0.07 mm).
PythonX can even compensate for material dimensional problems. Its 'electronic touch' sensing precisely measures the actual dimensions of the workpiece, so it can recalculate the cutting path to make corrections for bent or imperfect shapes. Cambered, convex, concave, bent or web not centered on the flange are all defects that can be compensated for thanks to PythonX's probe/measure feature. That reduces rework in the shop and material rejections at the job site.
Too good to believe? Let us show you. We'd be pleased to send you a free PythonX DVD or to set up a live demonstration of this incredible fabricating workhorse.