US truck maker chooses Unison tube benders

A leading sub-contract manufacturer of large-diameter tubular parts for the US heavy-truck industry, Tube Specialties Co (TSCO) is installing five new-generation CNC tube-bending machines from Scarborough-based Unison Ltd (www.unisonltd.com). These all-electric machines will be used to fabricate a very broad range of tubular parts — from brake lines to large-diameter exhaust pipes — mainly for clients in the automotive sector.

TSCO is one of the most successful sub-contractors serving the US truck and automotive manufacturing sector, and these machines were bought to help the company maintain its lead position by keeping costs down and allowing it to respond more flexibly to the just-in-time manufacturing demands of many of its clients.

TSCO, which operates from sites in Oregon, North Carolina and Mexico, selected Unison’s brand of all-electric benders over traditional hydraulically powered machines for two main reasons: reductions in scrap and energy
savings.

Over recent years, the batch sizes requested by many of TSCO’s clients have become much smaller, and order quantities ranging up to around 50 now account for most of its output. Many of these parts are produced to meet the just-in-time demand of the truck manufacturers’ assembly lines, with several deliveries per day to the point of use.

The company already has dozens of hydraulic bending machines; when setting these up for a new batch of parts, it is fairly common to create up to two pieces of scrap before the desired shape is achieved. By contrast, Unison’s all-electric machines can reload the program and replicate the set-up conditions under software control, eliminating all scrap in day-to-day operations.