John Jones Steel in New Zealand currently has a large project for a new out-patient facility requiring large 1m diameter pipes with lots and lots of stud welding and drilled holes. Their multi-spindle drill line could not drill the pipe so they looked for alternate solutions including subcontracting out the work.
After the subcontractor took 5 times longer than planned and came in twice as expensive as quoted, John Jones asked if they could use their trusty Ocean Avenger drill line. They were advised that the pipe would fit in the machine, and that holes drilled on the center line would be fine, but holes drilled off center would cause the drills to break, so they would have to rotate the pipe multiple times.
The guys are John Jones don’t take NO for an answer and after adding a temporary fixture to accommodate the pipe, they relocated a sensor to allow the drill to approach the pipe at slower speeds, and not be deflected. And for the off-center holes they drilled at a slower feed rate.
Not only did their modifications work, but several thousand holes later the drill- bit is still going strong – giving them a cost-effective processing solution much cheaper than they had anticipated.
Just another example showing the Ocean Avenger is a machine capable of far more than just drilling beams! And why so many of our smaller customers, who eventually upgrade to larger equipment, almost always keep their Avenger Single Spindle drill, as it will do so many operations not possible on multi-spindle drill lines or CNC plasma copers.
