Edmonton Valve’s CNC Bender Makes Quick Work of Custom Orders

Computer controls allow creativity along with precision and fast tube bending

CNC Tube Bender. To learn more about Edmonton Valve's Custom Solutions department and their service offerings, download the Custom Solutions PDF here.

No matter how good you might be at bending tubing, it would be hard to outperform our CNC tube bender. It can make identical bends in hundreds of pieces of tubing, do it quickly, and remember exactly what it did the next time you put in a re-order. And that's only the beginning.

CNC stands for "computer numerical controls," the brains inside the computer that make this a precision instrument. It's a big machine, about 10 feet long, three feet high and three feet wide. That means it can handle big bends, with a radius of up to 42 inches.

The computer controls mean you get exactly the bend you ask for every time, no matter how complex the angles. That's crucial for jobs that require a lot of identical pieces. One of our customers needs a simple part involving two bends in a piece of quarter-inch tubing.

"We make 50 at a time," says Derek Green, operations coordinator for our Custom Solutions department. "If you have all the cut pieces, it takes only about 15 to 30 seconds for each piece."

Naturally, some custom orders take longer to produce than others. In most cases, though, we can turn out an order within a week. For a single part, we often can get it done the same day.

Easy adjustment

What makes our machinery especially valuable is its ability to work from an existing part rather than requiring drawings or a list of dimensions.

Say you have a piece of tubing you need to replace. We can set it in our vector machine that works with the CNC bender. The vector machine scans your part, produces a 3D drawing of it, and sends the information to the bender. When we feed in a cut piece of tubing, the bender makes an exact duplicate. It's easy to know what length of tubing to cut, because our machinery will tell us, down to a thousandth of an inch. Knowing the precise length means no wasted tubing.

Suppose you've brought in the part because it was damaged somehow. Once we've scanned in the damaged part, we can adjust the drawing to move everything into its proper alignment. We'll be glad to print out the new drawing for you.

Or, suppose the original part is fine, but you need a version with an extra inch of tubing somewhere. It's easy for us to adjust the dimensions on the computer. The CNC bender assigns a different part number to each version, and stores the information. That means when you come back next year for another run, we already have all the information we need to make fresh parts.

"It stores everything, and it backs up as well," Green says. " So if we lose power or lose documents on the computer, we can load it from a backup storage spot."

Take a look

Most of our customers know about CNC bender because we like to show it off on our shop tours. When customers come in for training, we'll demonstrate the machine by making a couple of sample bends.

But if you've missed out somehow, come on by. We'll be glad to show you what our CNC bender and our vector machine can do. Download the Custom Solutions PDF to see what our capabilities are.

Additional resources:

• New Apps Put Swagelok Product Information at Your Fingertips!
• Meet Edmonton Valve’s Stacey Phillips
• 5 Ways Tubing Beats Piping in Small-Bore Applications

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