The pressure to reduce manufacturing costs, the need to meet increasingly difficult challenges (tight radii, thin wall materials, complex shapes to fit in small spaces etc.), uptime requirements, the demands for defect free production: these are the principles underlying our product development.
Solutions span from standalone bending systems to fully integrated production processes.
Air conditioning systems today have increasingly more contorted, close bend patterns, very tight radii and expensive materials. There is tremendous pressure to keep part costs down. Production must run non-stop, 24/7. This means a system must operate at close to 100% availability.
Depending on the specific requirements BLM GROUP can offer a variety of different, dedicated bending and endforming solutions, each capitalizing on decades of experience in the automotive industry.
- The solution on one machine: SMART!
SMART is a CNC all-electric multi-radius bending machine with integrated automatic loading and unloading systems. Its compact layout and integrated loading-unloading ensure automatic non-stop operation. It can be used for multi-radius, left and right in-process bending, with or without mandrel, on metal tubes, pre-assembled parts (with flanges and end forming etc.) and hybrid parts. This makes the SMART particularly well suited for bending tubes with complicated shapes and multiple radii typically found in the automotive and air conditioning industries.
- The coil solution on one machine: 4-RUNNER!
4-RUNNER is the ideal tube bending machine when bending parameters (medium radius, diameter, thickness) are less restrictive and as such permit bending without a mandrel: it is a complete production process that starts from coil, straightens, end-forms, faces, bends, cuts, shapes and finally unloads the finished part. All in one system. It lets you easily adopt just-in-time operations, simplifying logistics, eliminating intermediate steps and secondary operations and guaranteeing finished part quality, across multiple shifts.
- From coil, with mandrel: the complete solution!
For applications that require tighter bending parameters (tight radius, small diameter and thin wall thickness) combined with high cosmetic requirements combining a 3-RUNNER and SMART means being able to have a complete integrated process starting from a coil and bending with a mandrel. An extremely effective solution providing rapid cycle times and low part costs through simultaneous operations and optimised material consumption.
- Automatic production processes
If the production batch size justifies a dedicated process, BLM GROUP CNC tube bending machines can be easily integrated together to create an automated production processes.
The technical features of BLM GROUP tube bending machines coupled with their reliability and worldwide service network makes BLM GROUP the ideal equipment partner for the automotive industry.
The all-electric control of every axis and simplified control system provides BLM GROUP machines with guaranteed process reliability and system availably of close to 100%.