Stainless Steel Tube Fitting
Manufacturer Improves Productivity
With New All-Electric Tube Benders
Two new all-electric tube bending machines
are helping Ultibend Industries to boost the
manufacturing productivity of stainless steel
tube fittings for food and beverage processing
systems. Customised to suit Ultibend’s
proprietary manufacturing process, the
machines from Unison automate the bending of
tube fitting shapes such as elbows and U-bends,
in sizes from 1/2 to 4 inches diameter. Initial
manufacturing operations have demonstrated
that the new machinery boosts manufacturing
speed compared with the previous hydraulic
bending process.
and they have served Ultibend well, but they are
hydraulically powered - and critically for the future
development of the company - only offer a very
basic level of machine and operator control. As
the company has expanded, it became interested
in upgrading the bending process with more
flexible all-electric machines - using softwarecontrolled servomotor controlled bending.
Developing its own solution to this upgrade
would involve familiarity with servomotor based
motion control as well as much more sophisticated
machine control and interfacing software - and
it was viewed as too big a step for the Ultibend
engineering team. So, it decided to look to the
commercial market for an upgrade.
Ultibend started in 1992 as a subcontract tube
bender, supplying architectural pipework. The
company also found a market for tubular parts
for the strong local food processing industry, and
evolved from sub-contract work into offering a
broad range of stainless steel tube fitting parts for
applications including food, winery, brewery, dairy
and sanitary processing.
Ultibend settled on Unison as the supplier, largely
because of the fact that it had started life as a
machine controls and software supplier and that a
large proportion of its output was customised.
“We didn’t want a standard machine, so
discovering Unison was great. Their willingness
to customise - and the fact that they are genuine
machine control experts - gave us confidence that
we would get the far-reaching solution that we
As part of the company’s development, Ultibend
designed and manufactured its own tube bending
machines. There are now four of these machines
TN MAY 2016
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