Infrastructure Fabrication Focus: Pole Forming at Scale
Date Posted: January 9, 2024
Posted In: Discussion,
From The Fabricator: Drive down a well-lit road at night on a freeway. Look up during a Friday night football game at the local high school. That’s the rarely noticed light and utility pole doing its job. Rising infrastructure spending has shined a light on these poles and any number of other large fabrications. They appear utterly ordinary, but look at them closely, and their forming method isn’t so obvious.
The operations producing them are anything but ordinary. They incorporate extraordinarily large press brakes, sometimes singles but usually of the tandem or tridem variety. And many are extraordinarily automated, with little manual intervention.
“These systems entail the least amount of hands-on time with the material as possible,” said Matthew Crosby, regional sales manager at Pacific Press Technologies. “In some cases, material will come off a truck and go right to the press brake. It’s formed, and pushers eject a completed form to be welded.”
These specialty applications incorporate several critical elements: streamlined material movement, advanced process control, and unique tooling and gauging to ensure forming reliability. For specialty fabricators, scrapping these massive plates just isn’t an option.
Blank to Bend to Weld
To develop the optimal setup, application engineers usually start by asking questions about the material. As Danny Semick, sales manager at Revolution Machine Tools, explained, “Material really is the biggest factor. We need to know the material type, thickness, and part length. Are we talking 60 or 100 ft., or are we talking shorter, like 20 or 30 ft.?” (“Short” is a relative term here.)
Material shape also enters the equation. Tapered poles will have trapezoid blanks, while nontapered poles will be square.
The very next question, Semick said, involves the flow of the product, whether starting from a blank slate (like a new plant being constructed) or an existing facility. Systems vary widely depending on the space available.