Description
A pipe spool fabrication facility needed to alleviate the bottleneck of time consuming pipe/flange/elbow fit-up with a range of 2" through 60" diameter. Fit-up cycle times were taking several hours on average and required a welder/fitter and one helper. In addition, the customer needed height adjustable welding positioner with torque output suitable to handle the very large offset loads required.
The customer chose popweld Welding Automation as their partner after considering other manufacturers' offerings for the following reasons:
- The customer's sister facility had fully outfitted their pipe spooling shop with popweld equipment over the past 10 years and could directly speak to equipment quality, fast lead times, training and after-market support.
- Reliability and reputation was what the multi-billion dollar company built itself on and needed a partner that embodied these key values.
- The customer toured popweld's manufacturing facilities to review QC, Engineering and Fabrication ability.
- After meeting with popweld's engineering group, they knew that popweld had both the experience, creativity, and capacity to meet looming tight production timelines set by their management.
Process
The customer was using a combination of roller frame cribbing, shimming and cranes. The work piece was fitted with the crane onto the ROLLER and cribbing, positioned and repositioned until eventually the pipe was ready to weld. Often the use of sledge hammers were used for the fine adjustment. This typically would take a couple of hours with 2 workers.
The LJ Solution
POPWELD was able to design a custom system, build, train and deliver the first 40T SYSTEM to the customer.
The following key components were refined to best optimize the customer's budget and specification needs:
40 Ton for highly productive A crane would load the pipe sections onto the rollers and the 40TMR alignment roll system would quickly fit up the pipe for tacking.
The roller system enables alignment utilizing hydraulically actuated idlers (up and down, left and right) and lateral track motion (rail system) for bringing the pipe sections together, without the use of wood cribbing, manual jacks, and constant crane reconfigurations.
