Leo Valerio, a veteran metal fabricator who has work experience of more than forty years in his metal fabrication shop, the Valco Planer Works Inc. that joined after his father had set it up with the top-notch machines of that time. It was 1986 and he has been around those machines ever since.
Of course, there had been changes to the laser cutting machines, metal bending press brakes, welding equipment, metal rolling equipment, etc. Some even got replaced entirely by their advanced, automated, and modern counterparts.
The metal fabrication company also changed its name along the way. Now you’ll find it as Valco Precision Works.
They have machinery for sandblasting, industrial finishing, fabricating, and of course, welding. So it’s safe to say that he has seen a lot of machines in his 40 years of experience.
This means he has seen the machines develop as new and automatic parts take over. The initial designs for many machines changed dramatically. But he can’t say that he has seen any drastic change to the traditional seam welding equipment.
After being charged with the building seam welders for a client, Valerio thought that he can do much better with the designs for traditional seam welding machines. He and his entire team put their thoughts and efforts to the limit and debuted their modern take on the seam welders at 2017s FabTech, the trade show at Chicago later that year.
These seam welding machines are being sold by another company called MITUSA Inc. Their name stands for “Made in the USA”. These MITUSA units are designed to help you achieve higher accuracy.
Generally, the traditional seam welding units track setups with the cam followers to move where the seam is being made on the metal pipe or tube. But these newly designed seam welders use linear rails that have bearing blocks. This gives the fabricators a great hold and free travel with the carriage. This way, the fabricators can put a lot more weight on them without having to worry about the carriage tottering or teetering.
This additional hold-strength gives the fabricators a higher rate of accuracy. Also, it lets the welding power source to be mounted on the wall.
The tracks are machined to a .005 inches straightness tolerance. This way, the seam can be straighter than it would be with a traditional one.
Once MITUSA was able to improvise the mechanical aspect, it was time to look for the best operation controls. They figured that the control needs to be rugged and also flexible enough to meet their customers’ applications. After a while, MITUSA found all these characteristics into the controls from Computer Weld Technology.
This company is well equipped to control any to all arc welding process and also has suitable memories to store different weld programs. Besides, it is very easy-to-use and the interface is smooth.
Overall, if the modern design gets the attention that it deserves, the changes will be clearly visible to the stainless steel fabrication, aluminium fabrication, and steel fabrication processes. And judging by the appreciation that modern and automated technology got in metal fabrication industry, it’s safe to say that not only this new take on welding but also everything that can help metal fabricators to achieve higher precision will get the attention it deserves. Besides, more and more reinventions in the design are becoming a demand for this industry.
Leo also believes that once their modern take is spread throughout the world, more and more fabricators will be interested to develop the existing models of machines to get even better products. Better results will in terms, result in greater company reputation and honestly, who doesn’t want that?
