Sometimes an off the shelf product just won’t suffice!
A customer approached us with a need for a custom built sheet metal enclosure for ships. It is an electrical enclosure so it needed to be water tight and conform to other best practices when designing for this purpose.
Often, in this customer’s industry, companies will buy stock Hoffman enclosures and then modify them to suit their needs. In this case – and we suppose in many other cases – it wasn’t practical to do that.
We designed and engineered the box to the customer’s specification and fabricated the enclosure in house while meeting the specified time frame. The pictures in this post are pre-final finish but you can get a great idea of what the final product is going to look like.
The net result for our customer is a product that is a signature representation of their work instead of a modification of someone else’s product.
One of our clients recently approached us with a unique manufacturing challenge. Actually, it was more of an engineering challenge!
The product is a folding ramp that is used for heavy duty equipment that needs to be loaded. It’s very useful for heavier equipment because of its ability to affect a more gradual ramp slope.
The Challenge
When fully extended, the ramp was not strong enough to manage the heaviest loads. Adding more materials made the ramp assembly unnecessarily heavy and increased the overall cost of manufacturing.
So how do you increase the overall strength of a product like this while not adding to overall weight or cost to manufacture?
The Solution
We set to work strengthening the ramp system conceptually using our Solid Works modelling system. We found that if we added stratigically placed embosses and weldments then the ramp would have enough rigidity to support the specified loads.
We were also able to engineer in material savings by using this methodology. We estimate it cut down material usage by 10% overall. That’s quite a savings over a long run of this product!
We produced the newly engineered prototype in house using our Laser Cutting, high precision forming equipment, and a welding and finishing cell. The client was thrilled with the changes made to the product and is looking forward to producing the ramp for the market place.
Do you have a fabrication challenge that needs a fresh pair of eyes? Not only do we fabricate prototypes and production runs of sheet metal products we also design and engineer using the best tools available today. Give us a call! 800-235-2595
By Joel | October 22, 2008
CEL has recently invested in software that can dramatically lower our customers material cost thru coordinated production runs. Many customers have been impressed with the additional value delivered to them in the form of real cost savings.
Nesting software allows us to take any configuration or combination of parts that begin as flat cut or stamped material which lay out in such a way as to maximize the yield we can obtain from a sheet of flat material. We combine this nesting method with precise job scheduling so we can aggregate jobs from different clients that share similar materials. This allows us to maximize material yield for our customers. This is especially important as material prices continue to increase.
By putting some thought in how we process flat cut parts and by expanding and refining our scheduling capabilities we’ve been able to further realize our customer’s goals.
We invite you to have us evaluate your product or part against our process please contact us. We’d be happy to provide you with a cost saving nesting solution!
