Slitting line upgrade, Australia

Problem

Bronx was approached to help our customer improve safety and productivity, by reducing manual handling of tooling changes on a slitting line. The existing slitting line arrangement consisted of a fixed slitter head with a swinging external bearing support. Tool changes were a very manual process where each piece of tooling was removed individually from the slitter arbors before being replaced, once again individually, for the next run. This was both highly manual and counter-productive.

Solution

Bronx designed, engineered, manufactured and installed the Bronx Slitter Tooling Rig. The Bronx Slitter Tooling Rig consists of two sets of parallel circular arms, which lift and rotate to interface with the slitter arbors during a tool change. The two sets of circular arms allow the operator to pre-build slitter tooling on one set of arms whilst having an empty set of arms to receive the old tooling. During the change over sequence, the empty set of arms interfaces with the exposed slitter arbor ends allowing the operator to simply slide the old tooling off the slitter. The tooling rig then indexes to engage the other set of arbors where the operator simply slides on the pre-built tooling ready for the next run.

Result

The end result is an increase in productivity, with a significant reduction in the tooling change sequence time. Furthermore, allowing tooling to be pre-built and simply slid on and off the slitter greatly improves operator safety by reducing the manual handling by operators.

Coil Coating Lines and Galvanizing Lines are our specialty.