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Job shop’s big plans lead to big tube bender investment

Tube fabrication capability supplements stamping, sheet metal work

Job shop’s big plans lead to big tube bender investment

When General Stamping & Metalworks Inc., South Bend, Ind., realized that it was missing out on bids for assemblies with bent tubular components, the company decided to augment its stamping and sheet metal fabrication capabilities with a new tube bender, a 10-axis, all-electric machine capable of rotary draw and roll bending material up to 6 in. dia.

Although every fabrication shop has a unique history, many of them have the same origin, starting out as a one-man machine shop in a garage. Shops grow, markets change, new opportunities arise, and over the course of decades, many become full-fledged fabricators.

General Stamping & Metalworks Inc. (GSM), South Bend, Ind., is unique in this regard. The stamper and sheet metal fabricator began as an industrial sheet metal contractor.

When the company was founded in 1922, its owner saw a bright future in the automotive industry. The firm made paint lines, conveyor systems, and dust collection equipment for Studebaker, which had its headquarters and manufacturing operations in South Bend. Sheet metal contracting remained GSM’s focus for decades.

Under the leadership of the second generation, the company opened a five-man division to manufacture parts for OEMs. The sheet metal contracting business wasn’t as lucrative as it once had been, and it wasn’t long before the new division was making most of the profit. Manufacturing would be the company’s future.

Stamping carried the company through another three decades. During the tenure of its current President/CEO John Axelberg, the company expanded and refined its sheet metal fabrication capabilities and recently upgraded its tube fabrication capacity.

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Every business, from the smallest proprietorship to the largest corporation, has its own way of developing growth plans. Whether expanding its share of current markets, establishing a foothold in a peripheral market, or entering a new market altogether, its plans might be back-of-a-napkin simple or researched and developed with deep complexity. Regardless of the particulars, each company has its own way of going about it. GSM has been refining its approach for decades.

“Our first laser had a 4-by-8 bed,” Axelberg said. It was a low-cost, entry- level machine, but the company soon found itself declining opportunities that required a 5-by-10 envelope. Looking back, Axelberg sees with 20/20 vision the limitation of buying a machine with the smallest common dimensions.

“We haven’t bought a 4-by-8 machine since then.”

That lesson paid off when the company took a big step forward with its press brake technology.

“We bought our first precision CNC press brake in 1999,” Axelberg said. “We bid on a part that needed an extended stroke and a lot of clearance behind the bed. We found that just one manufacturer had a machine with enough clearance.”

Job shop’s big plans lead to big tube bender investment

Back-to-back hard-way bends and an easy-way bend on one workpiece show off the capabilities of a modern bender.

This was the opposite of the laser purchase. Rather than buying a machine with a limiting dimension, the company invested in a machine with plenty of headroom.

The company has made many investments since its first sheet metal laser and its first CNC press brake, but the lessons learned with those early purchases continue to inform its capital equipment strategy. The company regularly updates its sales forecast and adds equipment proactively to maintain capacity for more work. Additionally, when bringing a new technology in-house, it selects equipment with capacity and capabilities beyond what is necessary for the work at hand. These principles came to bear when it invested in a modern tube bending machine. Although the company had been laser cutting and bending tube for decades, its bending technology had become dated in recent years.

“Bending tube was a supplementary process, not a core process,” Axelberg said. For assemblies that required complex tube components, GSM had to outsource the tubular portion. The additional cost and time associated with outsourcing caused the company to miss out on a lot of bids. This changed early in 2019 when the company invested in a new 10-axis machine from AMOB.

An all-electric machine capable of bending up to 6-inch-diameter tube, the eMob 150 is well outside of the commodity range (up to 3 in. or so). While hydraulic machines long were preferred for their muscle, advances in electric drive systems narrowed the gap. GSM’s new machine can handle rounds, squares, rectangulars, and other shapes including heavy-wall structurals.

It wasn’t long ago that engineers were trained to design tubular components around certain bending guidelines, such as just one radius per part and the need for a minimum straight length between bends. Having roll bending, rotary draw bending, multistacked tooling, mandrel capability, and carriage boost on one machine puts an end to such restrictions

The imaginations of designers who specify ever-more-interesting tubular forms have created a demand for increasingly capable machines; the positioning accuracy of electric servomotors and the abilities of modern software have helped machine builders meet that demand. GSM’s machine can bend a rectangular tube the easy way on one bend, the hard way on a subsequent bend, and do so with a mandrel to keep deformation to a minimum. In the old days, if anyone had designed such a component, it would have consisted of two or three bent components welded together.

Beyond the bending capability is the supply chain efficiency. GSM can make an assemby from several stampings welded to a length of bent structural tubing with multiradius and multiplane bends and laser-cut features, under one roof.

Has the investment generated an instant ROI? No, but the work is steadily growing, having started with three bumper assemblies for an automotive customer, and Axelberg is confident that the machine’s capabilities will provide an entry point to several new markets the company has long been interested in serving.

In the U.S., AMOB is represented by Innovative Tube Equipment Corp.

About the Author
FMA Communications Inc.

Eric Lundin

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8262

Eric Lundin worked on The Tube & Pipe Journal from 2000 to 2022.