As an importer and distributor of steel pipes and their complimentary fittings, International Tube and Fittings (ITF) will soon be celebrating their 10th anniversary, supplying steel pipes and fittings to the fire protection industry for use in sprinkler systems, as well as the mechanical heating, ventilation and plumbing industries and even for use as hand-railing.
Located in Wednesbury, in the heart of the West Midlands "Black Country", the company occupies a huge 51,000 sq ft warehouse which ensures that the capacity and range of products held in stock are always available to their customers.
Cutting stock pipes to length is an important part of the business of being a stockholder and ITF satisfied this requirement in their early days with the purchase of a horizontal band saw from Prosaw.
The bandsaw was originally configured to saw the tubes to length individually, but as business increased, capacity became critical and the decision to upgrade the facility became crucial.
In order to increase the capacity of the existing sawing facility, Prosaw designed a system that would be capable of sawing the tubes in bundles instead of sawing them individually. This was achieved by designing special purpose clamps to hold complete bundles of tubes during the cutting process. The clamps, which are interchangeable depending on the size of the bundle, hold each bundle firmly during cutting.
Since a bundle of 1/2" diameter tubes contain 169 separate tubes, all of which are cut simultaneously, the resulting savings in time are spectacular.
Commented Joint Managing Director Rosemary Slater "We are obviously delighted with the resulting system and we found that Prosaw's approach to our problem was both flexible and solution oriented. They gave us lots of help and assistance in setting the new system up, especially in terms of feeds and speeds, as well as making sure that the blade life was optimised."
