To advance its already strong standing in the marketplace as a repairer and refurbisher of large and medium-sized rotating electrical machines, Marthinusen & Coutts (M&C) has acquired four new state-of-the-art coil production machines for its Johannesburg coilshop.
Coilshop Manager, Shawn Teixeira (left) and Operator, Mbukeleni Musibuko, with the new automated CNC coil spreader machine.
The new machines, purchased from a manufacturer in Europe, are: an automated CNC coil spreader machine, an automated looping machine, a CNC hydraulic coil heat press, and an automated high-speed taping machine.
“The automated CNC coil spreader machine represents a major advance on the manually operated hydraulic spreader machines we’ve been using up to now,” says Shawn Teixeira, M&C’s Coilshop Manager.
“It is a game-changer for us in terms of serving the market more effectively. With this new machine, the speed of production and the product quality are hugely improved. The production rate is much faster and because the process is fully automated, the product is now consistently of the highest possible quality, reliability and uniformity,” he says.
The nine-tonne eight-metre-long new machine, which M&C started operating at its Cleveland, Johannesburg, workshop in March this year, can form coils at the rate of one a minute. “This is almost 30 times faster than the rate at which we can form a coil with one of our six old labour-intensive machines. Production on the old machines is also subject to human error and therefore more prone to inconsistency in quality,” says Teixeira.
The new machine, one of only a few fully automated coil spreaders in operation in South Africa, has been specially modified by the manufacturers to protect it from the potentially damaging effects of local loadshedding conditions.
“In addition to protecting the machine from sudden loss of power supply when loadshedding occurs, this modification ensures that the spread sequence as it was at the time of the power interruption is retained in the memory, so when the power is restored, the machine can carry on operating from where it left off,” Teixeira says.
Like the new coil spreader machine, the other three newly acquired machines are faster and more efficient than their respective predecessors. They include specific features that present key benefits.
- The automated looping machine incorporates automatic measuring of the correct dimensions for the loop, automatic tensioning of the wire, and forming two loops simultaneously.
- The CNC hydraulic coil heat press removes human error factors in coil pressing and bolsters M&C’s existing heat presses.
- The automated high-speed taping machine adds production capacity in coil taping to match the increased throughput in coils achieved with the new CNC coil spreader machine.
“All the advantages improve quality and efficiencies in the production of the coils, ensuring faster turnaround times for customers’ machines,” Teixeira says.
For more information visit: www.mandc.co.za
