To further advance its already strong standing in the marketplace as a repairer and refurbisher of large and medium rotating electrical machines, Marthinusen & Coutts (M&C) has acquired four brand new state-of-the-art coil production machines for its Johannesburg coilshop.
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
- 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,” said Shawn Teixeira, M&C’s Coilshop Manager.
“It is therefore a huge game-changer for us in terms of serving the market more effectively. Both the speed of production and the product quality are vastly improved. Not only is its production rate much faster, but because the process is fully automated the product is now consistently of the highest possible quality, reliability and uniformity,” he explained.
The 9t 8m long new machine, which commenced operation in M&C’s Cleveland, Johannesburg, workshop in March this year, is capable of forming 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 labour-intensive old machines, which are subject to human error and are therefore more prone to inconsistency in quality,” Shawn remarked.
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 load-shedding conditions.
“In addition to protecting the machine from sudden loss of power supply when load-shedding occurs, this modification also ensures that the exact spread sequence at the time of the power interruption is retained in the memory so that when the power is restored the machine can carry on operating from where it left off,” Shawn stated.
Like the new coil spreader machine, the other three newly-acquired machines are speedier and more efficient than their respective predecessors.
Special feature and advantages of these machines include:
- 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 throughput increase in coils because of the CNC coil spreader machine’s speed.
“All the advantages improve quality and efficiencies during the production of the coils, assuring faster turnaround times for customers’ machines,” Shawn concluded.
