News Tube laser cuts beveling, weld prep time

So, when an opportunity arose two years ago to gain a competitive advantage by installing a 128-foot-long, 3-D tube laser machine that bevels and cuts up to 16-inch-diameter, 45-ft.-long tube, it was in the company’s grain to act on it.President Sterling Jensen said “We really are kind of picky about edge quality. It’s incredibly important to several of our customers. I doubt there’s a fabricator in Utah that has edge quality as good as we do on very large tube and pipe." See Figure 1.

After installing the large tube laser—a customized TTM FL400 3-D CO2 machine—for its cut quality, Richards slashed its tube beveling and fabrication production time from hours to minutes. It now has precise control over the bevel types, widths, and angles. The tube laser has greatly multiplied the company’s capabilities so that it can handle “Hail Mary” projects and throw a larger lasso around its potential market base.

Vice President of Tube Laser Sales Kevin Jones said that a retrospective analysis of the company’s successes drove the decision to purchase the tube laser. “We looked back at what has made us successful or where we had market growth. It was when we were able to differentiate ourselves from others by having capabilities nobody else in the area has.”

Bevel Types, Capabilities

The precision and control over the bevel types, widths, and cuts that the tube laser affords has multiplied the company’s capabilities.

“With the tube laser, we can perform V beveling, Y beveling, and K beveling,” Jones said (see Figure 2).

V Bevel. External V bevels are the most common, Jones explained. The angle is cut to widen on the exterior of the piece to allow for it to be welded from the outside. Alternatively, the bevel can taper to the inside on an interior V bevel. “So if you have a short piece of tube and you want to weld it on the inside, you can do that,” Jones said.

Y Bevel. This type of bevel combines a vertical cut with an angled cut. The tube laser allows extreme precision in both the degree of bevel angle and how wide or narrow the straight and angled cut will be.

On a recent project, the fabricator was able to cut a 1/16-in.-wide vertical cut and 1/8 in.-wide, 30-degree bevel for weld prep on a part with a 3/16-in.-thick wall. The machine rim-cuts first, and then it makes the bevel. “It’s beveled only partway, and we can control the width of the bevel and the width of the vertical,” Jones said.

X Bevel. This type of bevel is sharp inside and out, with no flat spot on the interior of the hole.

K Bevel. The K bevel comes to a point in the middle of the material thickness. It is used on parts that are welded on both the inside and outside, as when a tube is inserted through a part’s hole. “We use it for a job where a rod passes through a small 3-in. by 3-in. square tube. It gets welded on both sides of the tube, so both sides of the tube need weld prep,” Jones said.

Would this be possible without the tube laser? “On one particular part, we used to countersink the bevels with mag drills and drill presses for round holes and grind the bevels for the square and rectangular holes, edges, and ends. That took us hours,” said Dee Roskelley, senior vice president. “Now it takes us one-fourth the time. It’s not as perfect as a machined countersunk hole, but in most cases it is very acceptable for weld preparation,” he said.

Roskelley added that the company can control the degree of the bevel—45, 30, 20, or 10 degrees. The only way it could do that before was with countersinks using drills with an array of angles and expensive machining centers, he said. “So that’s where the tube laser provides flexible manufacturing in letting us choose what to do with that 3-D contouring.”

Laser Expands Capabilities

Once the tube laser was in place, the management team began looking at how it could augment current operations.

Slotted and Tabbed Weldment. In addition to cutting and beveling, the tube laser performs marking, slotting, and tabbing to help streamline downstream processes in assembling weldments. This has helped the company to be more competitive in its region.

In 2012 Richards took on a big plate job for an expansion of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco. The fabrications are for the telemetry movements; the cable and everything under the main track hang on it. The fabricator slotted and tabbed everything together and used a poka-yoke approach. The slot-and-tab approach worked so well that the company now looks for other opportunities to use the tube laser to mark the location of welds and to cut slots for tabs.

Coping for a Truss Assembly. The machine’s coping capability allows the fabricator to cut contours in square tube, channel, and round pipe that greatly improve fit-up on a round tube assembly (see Figure 3).

The assembly was for a large job cutting and welding a part for a truss going into a swimming pool complex. The assembly is for a 178-ft.-long truss with an 18-in. round bottom chord that’s on a five-degree angle. “Our customer literally had to build a gravel road out of the back of their property to even get it to a highway—it’s that long. It is supported and moved by a caboose and a tractor, and the truss is the trailer,” Jones said.

The top 12- by 12-in. flared square tube butts against a round tube. The left and right bevels are coped to fit tightly against the round pipe, which is the bottom chord. “This tube fits like a glove. We simply could not get that using a saw,” Jones said.

The accuracy of the bevel improved the fit-up so much that it reduced the amount of weld fill needed and eliminated the need to do multiple passes and grinding, Jensen said.

“Without the fit-up being so tight, you’d have large gaps. You’d need 12 passes to build up the weld.” By cutting it so accurately on the tube laser, it only needs a one-pass weld all the way around. So there’s 4 ft. of weld versus 14 ft.,” he said.

6 by 12. One weldment job involved a large 6-in. by 12-ft.-long square tube that Richards builds frequently (see Figure 4). The fabricator used a saw to cut bevels, then rotated the weldment and plasma-cut features into it. “It would take us about an hour and 20 minutes to do each section of it. The customer orders 100, 120 of them at a time,” Jensen said.

“It would take us a month to produce what they needed because of all the handling and all the time required to bevel and cut it. We thought, man, we’d really like to be able to put this on the new tube laser.”

Jones said that particular weldment—one of the company’s mainstay projects—was one of the reasons it decided to buy the large machine. “This part used to take us an hour and 20 minutes to bevel and cut. Now it is considerably quicker, with greater accuracy, and vastly improved lead times.”

Fluted Profile. The tube laser brought in more projects from new sources. “Right after we installed the machine, we had a customer call us out of the blue,” Jensen said. “‘We’ve got this fluted profile. We’re trying to cut a bunch of holes in it. Our OEM says it can be done, but we’ve been waiting six months. Can you guys help us?’” Jensen said.

“They sent the pipe and the CAD file. We got it and the CAD file on Thursday. These guys and Tiffany McDonald, our programming manager, put their heads together and by Friday afternoon, we gave him a call and said, ’Well, we’ve got good news and bad news.’ He said, ‘It’s been a lousy week. What’s the good news?’ We said, ‘The good news is we cut the pipe.’ He said, ‘That’s fantastic. That’s a hail Mary. What’s the bad news?’ I said, ‘And apparently we’re the only ones in the world who can do it.’ We told him what it would cost. He said, ‘We’ll have two truckloads to you on Monday.’”

Roll-formed Part. Recently another fabricator approached Richards with a problem. It had 2,700 9-ft.-long roll-formed channels that were missing features. The customer had missed performing a hole-cutting step before roll forming them and could not cut the holes afterward. “We figured out how to automate the cutting and beveling in the tube laser machine so we could bring the price point down to where the customer was better served by our retrocutting it than his starting over,” Roskelley said.

Machine Accelerates Throughput

Part movement occurs along five interpolated axes with ball recirculation screws and linear motors. Four self-centering sliding jaws of the mobile chuck move the workpiece along so that it can process different diameters and sections without equipment changes, according to TTM.

Roskelley said that the machine’s four-chuck system tipped the decision in favor of the TTM machine, because it can bevel and cut on the first and second chucks while unloading the processed tubes with chucks three and four. “With the four-chuck system, as it’s unloading, it’s already cutting the next tube. Also, mandrels three and four can perform weld preparation on the other end of the tube, so we can achieve near-zero material waste. A three-mandrel arrangement could not do that.”

The system minimizes productivity losses, Roskelley said. “The four-chuck system and the 3-D cutting is huge for us.”

Once the tube is loaded in the mandrels, laser sensors measure the length of the tube, angle, channel, or I-beam, and then move it into the cutting bay. A probe on the laser head comes down and measures points on the tube where different cutting features go. This probing ensures that accuracy is maintained throughout the whole length of the tube or structural shape.

Automated Loading, Unloading

The machine has an automatic front-loading system from chain and an automatic bundle rear-loading system. Independent manipulators allow the loading of tubes from the bundle and tubes or profiles from chains. The bundle hopper can accommodate round, square, and rectangular tubes up to 41 ft. long; wide-flange beam, channel, and angle up to 45 ft. long must be autoloaded from the chain in front one piece at a time. The machine can run a mixed load from the chains, “for example, one 6-in. channel, one 6- by 6-in. angle, one 3- by 6-in. rectangular tube, and one round pipe, all without making any changes to the gripper or jaws. We do it all the time,” Roskelley said.

Richards had the system customized with a 31-ft. offload because of building space constrictions, but it still is equipped to cut up to 45-ft.-long pieces that can be off-loaded in a unique way.

Getting to Know the Machine

Richards continues to search for new market opportunities and to explore ways to maximize its capabilities and equipment capacity.

“We’re still challenged,” Roskelley said. “There still are many things to learn in the world of 3-D beveling and weld preparation. With some third-party help, our cutting is the best we have seen in the tube cutting world.”

“We’re still testing it. We’re always trying to push the machine to its limits,” Jones said.

“That’s us in a nutshell,” Jensen said. “We figure it out.”

Photography by Douglas Barnes.

Skilled by Hart

Advanced equipment is only part of Richards Sheet Metal Works’ success story. Skilled people are the other.

“Our 90,000-sq.-ft. facility is outfitted with state-of-the-art machines, and our employees are as adept with a computer as they are with a pair of tin snips. A union shop, we take great pride in our innovation and ability to deliver a world-class product, made-to-order, for a competitive price,” the company’s website states.

CEO Steve Richards said that the company has long valued its skilled workforce. “Our motto has been ‘Hire the best people, supply them with the best equipment, and let them make money for you.’”

One of those valued employees is 60-year journeyman Hartmut (Hart) Jeske. He is not 60 years old; he has been with Richards for 60 years.

Jeske said he loves a challenge, and he tackles them nearly every day. He has seen his job change multiple times over the years as the company has morphed. That may be why he is well-known in the company as a problem solver, capable of resolving even the toughest cases. He’s seen them all.

The job’s challenges haven’t toughened him, though. When a signature is required on his work orders, Jeske signs them by drawing a heart.

As published by The Fabricator, August 2018.
By: Kate Bachman