Press brake setup has a way of meaning different things to different people. For certain operators, setup was the time it took to put the punches and dies on the press brake. That seems pretty straightforward, but if the operator also was involved in trying to shim up an old brake so that crowning was minimized during the forming cycle, that time involved in getting that first part right might have been left out of the setup equation. After all, the tooling was set up and ready to go in 10 minutes, even if it might have taken a full 30 minutes to get the brake ready to form parts.
Today, press brake setup time is not as open to interpretation as it used to be. Process engineers have a focus on uptime, and anything that works against that is quickly labeled as waste. A 30-minute setup time isn’t going to cut it.
This article originally appeared on thefabricator.com.
July 13, 2024