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CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT | ||||
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HARDOX WEAR PARTS DISTRIBUTOR INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY BY 33 PERCENT WITH HYPERTHERM INTEGRATED CUTTING SOLUTION Quality Machine in Bridgeport, West Virginia is a third generation job shop with 45 employees specializing in products and services for the oil and gas recovery industries. First founded in 1975 as a service provider for the surface mining industry, Quality Machine later expanded into parts manufacturing, custom design and fabrication, and sizeable proprietary jobs, often in the range of $100,000. Today their products include oil and gas booms, skidded and trailer mounted oil field units, Marcellus Shale fracturing fluid systems, and Hardox extreme duty buckets, and their service offerings include mining track repair, on-call service, and Hardox product distribution. Quality Machine had given up on their conventional plasma system. They were frustrated with poor cut quality, programming issues, and the lack of technical support from several product manufacturers. All of these issues together complicated seemingly minor steps in their production process and as a result, Quality Machine struggled with extended downtime on the production line. At times, production was brought to a virtual stand-still and they were left to trouble shoot on their own. Simple applications like marking part numbers on their parts became impossible. They were forced to do things like manual nesting at the controller; and, in spite of good consumable life, cuts were consistently rough and angled. Christian Marsh, the Business Manager and Safety Director at Quality Machine stated, “We needed good cut quality at the highest possible cut speeds, and we were getting saw tooth cuts with negative angles, even with consumables that were almost new. We gave up on cutting any holes and used punching or drilling instead. We had a lot of problems and no support. The components were not working together and everyone was pointing fingers at each other. It was a ring of excuses and no one would help us. Our machine was down and we were left high and dry.” The company considered waterjet as a replacement for their plasma system. They discovered waterjet would help with their cut quality issues, but had reservations about switching to that technology, because both operating and maintenance costs would increase. They were also apprehensive about waterjet, because managing additive abrasives, like garnet, would be a hassle. For those reasons, they decided plasma was worth a second look. After consulting with their table manufacturer they learned just how outdated their current plasma system was. Significant advancements in plasma cutting technology had taken place since the last time Quality Machine was in the market for a new machine. Quality Machine chose the HyPerformance HPR400XD plasma system from Hypertherm and then integrated it with Hypertherm’s EDGEPro CNC, ArcGlide THC and ProNest 2010 nesting software. This Integrated Cutting Solution delivered a number of benefits to Quality Machine including the ability to cut bolt-ready holes with plasma through the use of Hypertherm’s patented True Hole technology. “Buying all the components from one manufacturer was the biggest seller for us because we wanted everything to work together seamlessly, and it does,” Marsh says. “Software capabilities alone are leaps and bounds above what we had before, so our efficiency has improved. ProNest 2010 has totally changed our productivity and nesting abilities. The negative angles that we experienced with the old plasma system are gone and the consumables last 30 percent longer. The HPR400XD is instrumental in cutting all our Hardox parts and it delivers significantly improved cut quality. We needed the HPR400XD’s speed and True Hole’s cut quality, and our OEM has been terrific. Everything is working the way it is supposed to and that is what we wanted.” |
