PROCESS EQUIPMENT UPDATE
ABOVE: Automated tube upsetter line BELOW: Impacter rebuild
perform some of the tasks of a human operator, productivity can increase from several hundred pieces per hour to up to 3,000, depending on the type of products being forged. According to Ken Copeland, president of Ajax-CECO, the vast majority of project requests today involve some aspect of automation. “About 90% of the time we talk to customers today, they want equipment that has an automation component,” he says. Ajax-CECO, as it is now known, is one of the oldest manufacturers of forging equipment, having begun operations in 1875. In its more than 140 years of history, the company has built and put into production more than 6,000 horizontal and vertical forging presses. According to Copeland, most of the automation requests are for control consoles or some type of material handling and conveying equipment to bring the steel into the machine, move it around as needed for heating and forging, then finally deposit the finished item into a bin when completed. In the most advanced examples, entire forging line “cells” can be created that include sophisticated communications that report production rates and machine performance back to company networks. Tis demand, Copeland adds, applies to both new and existing forging equipment.
“It is not uncommon for a customer that has, or acquires, an older model of equipment to send it to us to be rebuilt or remanufactured while adding automation upgrades to it,” says Copeland.
MODERN APPROACH Modern Forge Tennessee is one of such companies. A hot steel forging company that makes motorcycle parts for Harley Davidson among other customers, Modern Forge uses Chambersburg (CECO) die forgers that date back to the 1980’s and weigh between 20 and 50 tons. Te company has more than 7,000 dies in its inventory. To continue to leverage its investment in its existing equipment, Modern Forge decided to update and upgrade the consoles on its drop hammers to improve performance, given it runs its equipment hard and at very tight tolerances. “We had some very good hammer units with some very outdated controls,” explains Wade Ferguson, maintenance manager at Modern Forge. “We knew that if any of the parts in the consoles went down, we would be offline for a while.” Aware that the intellectual property of Chambersburg Engineering had been purchased by the Ajax Manufacturing Company, Ferguson decided to reach out to the firm for the automation upgrade. “Ajax-CECO was able to build the new panels, create the necessary software to
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