A new era in fabrication

Following on from the commissioning of four new BDM cutting and machining centres at a combined cost of £1.7 million, TruFrame has now installed a new Urban welding and cleaning line that’s already offering outstanding levels of product quality, accuracy and consistency, the company said.

The new AKS 6910/8 Vario has been specified with electrically driven servo motors on each of the welder’s eight heads, which replaces the traditional arrangement of pneumatic cylinders that have been used on this sort of machinery for decades.

These smart heads communicate with each other in real-time, allowing them to drive together at the same rate and with the same degree of force. This not only ensures that all frame and transom/mullion elements are welded in perfectly square, but additional controlled pressure at the final squeeze point helps to improve overall joint strength.

The introduction of the new welder has also allowed TruFrame to further improve the visual appearance of all frame corner and transom joints by reducing the weld restriction from 2.5mm to just 0.2mm. The resulting pencil-thin weld line on foiled product is a striking visual enhancement, which extends around the entire frame rebate due to the profile specific tooling which formed a large part of the investment.

The corner cleaning section makes up the second half of the new line and provides an enormous amount of additional manufacturing capacity. The SV 800/4 automated CNC cleaning station is able to process four corner or transom joints in a single cycle time. The consistency of cleaning and final finish is improved with the use of Teflon-coated knives and bespoke cutter sets for processing odd-leg outer frames. Finally, the added automation through software-controlled transfer tables reduces the potential for damage caused by manual handling.

David Firmager, managing director of TruFrame, said: “Product quality is centric to everything we do in the business because consumers always want a better product. With our modern approach to customer service and our further investments in marketing and cloud-based ordering and lead-generation, we are heavily committing to all business processes for our customers in what we believe is a new era for window and door fabrication.”