Hard cutting made easier
Staniforth-HKB sawman, Mick Parkinson, setting up to cut high tensile steel into 31 mm thick blade blanks for a customer in the food processing industry
Engineering steel bar and tube supplier Staniforth-HKB Steel Ltd can now cut hard materials faster and reduce costs thanks to a new bandsaw and cermet coated tungsten carbide tipped blades.
The performance increases at the Rotherham-based company follow the installation of a Kasto Performance Cutting (KPC) derivative of the German manufacturer's TEC A5 bandsaw. The stockholder's operations manager, Dean Dainty, the machine cuts hard materials in one-third of the time it used to take on a larger TEC A7 bandsaw, installed in 2005.
Productivity increases of this magnitude were announced by Kasto in 2009 when it launched KPC technology in the UK. In essence, it encompasses attention to all aspects of the bandsawing process including blade selection, guidance and monitoring, machine construction, coolant delivery, feeds, speeds and control system. Specifically, it involves the innovative use of two spring-loaded tensioner guides to suppress and manage blade vibration and harmonics.
Staniforth-HKB cuts 410 mm diameter 817M40 high tensile steel in its annealed state into 31 mm thick slices to form blanks from which circular blades are subsequently produced for processing food.
With a cermet-coated, tungsten carbide tipped (TCT) blade on the TEC A5 with KPC switched on, the material was cut in nine minutes, three minutes faster than when using an uncoated TCT blade with KPC switched off. Previously, when similar material with a bimetal blade on the TEC A7, it took between 25 and 30 minutes to complete each cut – around three times longer than on the TEC A5 KPC.
Mr Dainty commented, " Increasing business means that we are cutting-to-length larger volumes of material. Many of them are hard or tough, which is the higher added value work we target.
"So we needed an additional bandsaw that could cope with the more exacting steels. KPC processing combined with cermet-coated bandsaw blades has proven to be the ideal combination."
He went on to examine the return on investment for each type of blade, taking into account its cost and performance. Cermet-coated TCT blades are typically £350 each and cut 14 to 17 m2 of steel bar, depending on the grade. Respective figures for uncoated TCT blades are £280 and 10 to 12 m2, while for bimetal HSS they are £120 and 8 m2.
Average cost for sawing 1 m2 is therefore £23, £25 and £15 respectively for coated TCT, uncoated TCT and bimetal HSS blades. However, the labour cost associated with changing the blades is considerably lower with TCT, especially the coated type, as the 15-minute exercise takes place less frequently. Most importantly, the dramatic increase in cutting speeds leads to much higher levels of productivity.
Staniforth-HKB is part of the Barrett Steel Group.
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