RbSA Industrial

Examine your shop floor safety procedures and tube bending equipment often to prevent the injuries that powerful machines can cause.

When considering upgrades, repairs, or new tube bending machines, metal fabrication shops should look beyond the equipment's technical capabilities and focus on business as a whole.

It's not uncommon for metal fabrication shops to struggle with producing precise parts on tube bending machines. The solution? Often times it comes down to simple math and communicating with the machine manufacturer.

A metal fabrication shop knowing how to respond to a tube bender in the emergency stop state means first knowing the circuits, voltage, and relays in the machine.

There are a lot of options when it comes to upgrading the controls on tube bender, but metal fabrication shops shouldn’t let fate force their hand because of fairing to replace an outdated system.

CNC tube benders are going to break—the forces involved encourage entropy all too well. What to do about it requires a long list of considerations.

Inconsistent leg lengths in bent tubes bedevil many a shop. How can you know the cause? Understand how tube bender axes are measured and set.

Discovering how tubing was consistently breaking for one well-run tube bending manufacturing operation was not easy until the team took the cover off a certain part and found a tear that was easily fixed.

When a digital servo drive kept showing carriage and overcurrent faults in CNC tube bending, technicians carefully followed the breadcrumbs to the source of the problem.

Keeping a tube bending machine in tip-top shape isn’t difficult if a metal fabrication shop maintains a regular routine. Here’s how.

Diagnosing the real problem that took out a CNC tube bender required a solid understanding of both the electrical and hydraulic systems in the machine—and the possible issues in both systems.

When a bender’s control system can’t complete the homing process, production can come to a halt. Troubleshooting the problem requires an understanding of how each axis is homed.

Every maintenance technician knows to shut off the power, lock the circuit breaker panel, and hang a tag on it, but this isn’t enough. OSHA instructs maintenance personnel to lockout, tagout, and control hazardous energy. Some don’t know how to take this step, which is different for every machine.

Work around live circuits? The hazards go beyond voltage and current. When 125,000 watts of power get converted into an arc flash, the result is an explosion. Learning how to identify the potential for an arc flash is the first step in preventing one.