Submitted by: Davefg Gaines

Machine tools for fabricating structural steel have grown in sophistication over the past 100 years, from simple handheld motorized drills and saws to sophisticated, fully-automated “heat cutting” systems. Today, those examining expanding with new structural steel fabricating equipment face an important dichotomy in their “technology platform” selection that didn’t exist in earlier times: the traditional “drill, punch and saw” methods or the new “flame cutting” technology. It isn’t always easy or obvious to see which technology philosophy will best serve a business . . . but the one selected can make a fundamental difference in the company’s ability to compete.

For over 100 years, Peddinghaus has been designing and building the traditional structural steel fabricating machines used by numbers of fab shops around the world. Their philosophy has been one of specialization – dividing up the myriad different operations that must be performed by the fabricator into distinct groups and then configuring machines focused on the resulting groups. Peddinghaus has come up with a lineup of machines that fabricates beams, plate, angle, HSS according to the required operations of cutting, drilling holes and making variable shapes of different sizes. This philosophy gives rise to features such as high spindle speed, workpiece indexing, specialized workholding, and others that make any individual machine highly efficient at the specific tasks it was designed to accomplish. Such expressly optimized machinery has obvious benefits: say you have numerous bolt holes to make in numerous pieces of steel, you get it done fast. But if you have several different features that must be performed on a beam or channel, it must visit different machines to have them all done. That adds time and extra manpower to move the steel around the factory.

The latest technology development in structural fabrication employs an approach just the opposite of the Peddinghaus equipment specialization philosophy. This new approach uses automated flame cutting to execute a wide variety of operations on a single machine. Coming from a builder of custom machinery and material handling systems that has in recent years placed its focus on structural steel fabrication technology, this new robotic plasma cutting system is the polar opposite of the machinery lineup of Peddinghaus machines. PythonX is a single machine that accomplishes all of the necessary fabrication functions, as contrasted to the Peddinghaus philosophy of dedicating unique machines to different tasks. Early in its introduction (2005) the frequent complaint about the PythonX plasma cutting approach was that some operations – primarily making bolt holes – were somehow not done as well by flame cutting as by traditional tool drilling. That issue has since been shown to be unfounded, because plasma cut bolt holes meet all pertinent requirements for both roundness and dimensional precision.

The reason the versatile “one machine does it all” philosophy of the new robotic plasma-cutting machines is so compelling is simply that it requires only one machine, rather than 4 or 5. That one machine takes up considerably less floorspace and considerably less capital budget than the traditional multiple “specialized” machine approach. However, many believe the strongest advantage of the PythonX system to be the significant reduction in material handling that is otherwise called upon to shuttle workpieces between the different specialized machines needed in the Peddinghaus scheme of structural fabrication. This slashing of material handling lowers labor, lowers added capital expense and increases turns on raw material inventory.

In summary, structural steel fabricators now have two distinct philosophies as regards their choice of new fabrication capacity: 1. the traditional specialization path refined by Peddinghaus over many years, wherein multiple machines are highly focused for maximum performance on a narrow range of functions, or 2. the “one machine does it all” path developed through thermal cutting wherein a single plasma cutting torch, combined with powerful software and industrial robotics, can perform all necessary fabrication functions one immediately after another. The answer may not be as straightforward as you would think. Say you have 200 steel beams and must cut them to length then make four bolt holes in each end, employing machines that are optimized for rapid hole drilling, like a beam drill line, and cut-to-length may be the most sensible way to go. By contrast, if you have fifty or so steel beams that require bolt holes, copes, flange flush cuts, notches and cut-to-length, you might want to have them all processed on a single machine with no extraneous material handling. Each structural steel fabrication company will take the approach that matches their business needs. The question is, if you could only have one fabrication system, which would you choose?

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