A steel pipe mill had been outsourcing a hard surfacing (cladding) application for one of their highest use wear parts, an hourglass shaped steel roller. The customer needed to lower their costs, and explore savings opportunities by bringing the process in-house, to avoid expensive and cumbersome outsourcing and transportation costs.
In order to effectively take this job in-house, the solution required the following:
LJ responded with a subarc cladding system that fit the customer's needs and cut one of their top 5 largest outsourcing expenses by introducing the LJ pipe cladding positioner, integrated with a Column and Boom Welding Manipulator with a Lincoln AC/DC-1000 Subarc system, to their pipe fabrication facility.
Here's how the new process works:
*Please note, for internal LJ testing, we used a cylinder as we did not have access to the customer’s proprietary workpiece. Actual workpiece is similar in hourglass shape to the image below:
Since the positioner rotation speed is controlled by the integrated column and boom welding manipulator, the rotation is always rotating at the correct speed.
Step 3: Once a pass is completed, the custom welding positioner is tilted to place the welding head in optimal position, then Step 2 is repeated.
Step 4: Once the roller the entire surface of the roller is completed, it is removed, and sent for grinding to reface the surface.
CONCLUSION:
Initially, the end user was unsure of the ROI of investing in a new process that they had outsourced for years. LJ designed a simple and effective system to achieve all of their needs, delivering on the required cost savings, and with minimal training time for their new “in-house” process. Through the use of innovative material handling and welding integration, the customer was able to achieve over 20lbs/hour deposition, with the possibility of applying twin wire applications in the future to further increase this already impressive deposition rate. Additional automation features such as automatic indexing, seam tracking and remote view cameras, could be included to further maximize efficiency in the future.
After the first order of this cladding system the customer realized such a large cost savings that they ordered a duplicate system.