Since its founding in 1876 in the Pennsylvania coal belt, Hendrick Manufacturing in Carbondale has been producing perforated metal sheets in various designs. Initially, the company produced only screens for the separation of coal, but it later added other markets, making perforated sheets for the medical, automotive, water- and air-filtration, and architectural industries.
Precisely manufactured perforated sheets make an impressive visual statement in a building’s architectural design, both indoors and out. When used for cladding exterior walls, the demands are high on the precision of the perforated sheet panels. Requirements are even stricter for panels used in interior design. For example, decorative perforated sheets used in a company’s entrance area typically have large visible surfaces. The smallest unevenness is immediately noticeable. Expanded Perforated Metal
The punching and stamping processes used to make perforated sheets create stresses and unevenness in the material that make further processing almost impossible. To ensure its metal sheets have perfectly even surfaces for later use and to prevent time-consuming manual rework, Hendrick runs them through a leveler.
“With other machines, we used to have marks in the material, especially in the places where the metal sheets first enter the leveler,” said Alex Tonkin, manufacturing engineer. “We therefore often had to leave extra material on the sheets and cut it off after leveling to remove these marks.”
To continue to meet demand for perfectly flat perforated sheet, Hendrick Manufacturing went in search of a new leveler. The company contacted Schnutz GmbH of the b+s group.
“For initial tests with our typical perforated sheets, Schnutz put us in touch with a company in Germany that works with the targeted model,” said Tonkin. “We were able to take as much time as we needed with the tests and also learned a lot about the machine.”
Hendrick chose a high-precision leveler designed for perforated metal sheets up to 1,600 mm wide and 0.3 to 0.5 mm thick. These values depend on the yield strength (here, it’s 300 MPa) and the open cross-section. The speed can be between 2 and 20 m/min. Commissioned at the Carbondale plant in November 2022, the machine operates exclusively in stand-alone mode.
Dr.-Ing. Lutz-Stefan Heinrich, managing director of Schnutz GmbH, explained how his company’s levelers differ from conventional machines: “We design the drive area to be particularly compact in order to keep the footprint as small as possible. Leveling and back-up rolls are installed with their bearings in cassettes that can be removed and replaced as a unit with little effort. This trick makes maintenance easier and allows the use of leveling rolls with different diameters. It also extends the range of applications for our leveler.”
“The perforated metal sheets are fed into the machine manually, with the operator being supported by a special-design feed driver,” said Tonkin. “Even sheets with a high oil content on the surface can be reliably leveled with this. A cleaning device cleans the leveling rolls without the need for removal—an important feature that reduces downtime. In addition, a special coating on the infeed side leveling rolls increases grip. This makes malfunction during operation less likely.”
Hendrick also has experienced increased productivity with the new leveler.
“Sheets with small, open areas and large, fixed edges are difficult to straighten. With the new machine, we need a maximum of two passes even for difficult perforations. With increasing experience, it should be possible to reduce this to one pass in many cases,” Tonkin explained.
In addition, all relevant settings can be adjusted, checked, and corrected on the tiltable control panel, and proven parameters can be stored under the product name and recalled later. This helps reduce the time needed to train workers to run the machine.
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