North Yorkshire firm Unison has received an order for an all-electric CNC machine, which it believes will be the largest and most sophisticated all-electric pipe bender ever designed.
The order was placed by American company Newport News Shipbuilding, a supplier of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one of two shipbuilders of nuclear-powered submarines for the US Navy.
The machine, the first of its type to be built, which will be capable of bending large-bore tubing and piping up to eight inches in diameter.
It will extend the shipbuilder’s range of precision software-controlled bending facilities to include fabrication of larger diameter pipes that previously could only be bent on very high torque hydraulic machines.
Jim Saynor, sales manager at Unison, believes the deal represents Unison’s flexibility in their bending machine control technology.
“Through collaboration and the support of our partners in the USA, Horn Machine Tools, we have gained a thorough understanding of the needs of this prestigious shipbuilder, and have helped and advised them on numerous aspects of pipe and tube fabrication,” he said.
“Our software-based approach to bending control provides a fully scalable solution that can easily be extended to large diameter pipes, such as this order for an 8-inch machine.”
Work on the Unison 8-inch is scheduled to be completed towards the end of 2013.