Continuing investment in versatile all-electric bending machinery is helping one of the US Midwest’s leading tube and pipe fabrication specialists, Sharpe Products of Milwaukee, to meet the evolving business challenges in its sector of the metalworking industry.

The company has bought a 5-inch Unison tube bender from Horn Machine Tools. This is the latest in a series of all-electric bender purchases over the last few years. Sharpe made the investment to give the company an edge in meeting the demands of the tube and pipe jobbing business which has changed in recent years. Most customers no longer want to invest in stock, and batch sizes have reduced dramatically. This means that machine set-up times become a major factor in job pricing. It also means that any scrap generated during set-up - which can often run into several pieces when using older hydraulically-actuated bending machines - can have a negative influence on job costs.

Another major factor in the all-electric decision is the increased demand for tighter radius bending - often down to around 1D (one diameter of the tube size being bent). Sharpe puts this trend down to the way that many OEM companies are now optimising designs in terms of compactness, materials used, accessibility etc.

"All-electric bending machines help us to stay extremely competitive - on all types of projects - if we only had hydraulic machines we probably wouldn’t win a lot of the jobs we bid on," says Sharpe’s president Paul Krickeberg.

"The Unison machine can be configured for a new batch in typically a third of the time of a hydraulic machine, with no scrap or one piece at the most, and we have such fine control over the bending process that we can easily fabricate really complex shapes with tight radius bends, multi-radius bends, minimal straight sections between bends, etc."

The new machine is Sharpe’s second Unison-brand bender. The company has had a 3-inch Unison bender that has proven extremely popular with the workshop’s staff. That experience, and the support that Unison and its US partner Horn Machine Tools has given Sharpe made the decision to buy a second machine easy.