Plate Bending Machine for Extremely High Yield Strength Materials

ESCO Group LLC (Portland, OR) manufactures machinery, structural tools and other equipment used in construction, infrastructure and mining operations. To stay competitive with the industry’s growing preference for lightweight durability, they have been making excavator buckets out of increasingly sturdy variants of steel, including the formidable Hardox plate (also known as abrasion resistant plate). Hardox has an extremely high yield strength of 1,250 N/sq mm and is five times tougher than regular steel plate (which has a yield strength of 250 N/sq mm). This toughness is what gives Hardox plates their durability, but it also makes them exceedingly difficult to bend, especially through small radii. The shop has used a Roundo PAS420 plate roll bending machine for 25 years to successfully roll Hardox plates – and it is still going strong. However, they would now be making smaller machine parts using thick Hardox plates and they needed an upgrade that could bend these incredibly tough plates through small radii. The kind of drive torque, power and precision that this mammoth task requires would place undue demands on the Roundo bending machine.

ESCO sought out SweBend AB (Hässleholm, Sweden) for a new state-of-the-art plate bending machine with these advanced plate rolling capabilities, along with the ability to serve their manufacturing needs for as long as the Roundo has done. Another reason for purchasing a larger machine was the capability to form thicker plates in-house that were being formed by an outside contractor. When it comes to accurate and heavy duty plate bending, there’s no one-size-fits-all system. In this specific case, SweBend decided upon a sophisticated PB4-18-6 plate roll machine. This 4-roll machine is designed to handle complex bending radii and deliver perfect results in a single pass. Its dedicated smaller diameter top roll handles small bending radii, and its pre-bending power and torque surpass all comparable machines currently on the market. Together, these features would allow ESCO to accurately bend thick Hardox plates while retaining the ability to roll plates through small radii. The PB4-18-6 is also engineered with superior quality components that not only meet but exceed industry standards of durability.

The PB4-18-6 plate bending machine was further optimized with a proprietary CNC Type-7 Gold system. This intuitive HMI has significantly increased the speed, accuracy and repeatability of ESCO mass production tasks. The CNC Type-7 Gold offers advanced 8-axis controls, parallel control of side rolls and electronic pressure control of the central roll, allows interpolation of one side roll at a time, and can receive remote diagnostics and regular software upgrades.

When the new Hardox plate bending machine was ready, SweBend equipped it with a powered infeed table and shipped it with a spare parts package as a final effort to streamline and future-proof the system. The end result was an innovative plate bending machine that not only produces the best results with minimal effort for ESCO, but is also built to last. The machine was sold and delivered by Trilogy Machinery Inc. (Belcamp, MD), the SweBend representative in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The installation went as planned. “The machine can be compared with the Hulk’s mean older brother,” noted ESCO about the machine’s bending force.

ESCO Group LLC, 2141 NW 25th Avenue, Portland OR 97210, 503-228-2141, www.escocorp.com.

Trilogy Machinery, Inc., PO Box 70, Belcamp, MD 21017-1227, 410-272-3600, www.trilogymachinery.com.