Unwinding steel coils

Tucked into an industrial area in the east end of Toronto, Mecon Industries is a privately held Canadian firm that specializes in making coil handling equipment—the machinery that unrolls the coils and the straighteners that make the coiled steel flat so it can be worked by other machinery.

The company was founded in 1961 by Anthony Foscarini to manufacture press tooling, fixtures and machined parts. The company gradually expanded its product line to include custom designed machinery, conveyors, drilling machines, inspection equipment and coil processing equipment.

Today the company places its focus on two main product lines, sheet metal bending tools (or brake dies) and coil handling equipment. These areas comprise 70 per cent of the company’s business, with the other 30 per cent including machine shop and welding services, custom design and builds of specialty machines.

Mecon’s primary clients are associated with the automotive industry. “They tend to buy the biggest and the most,” says Jeff Norman, vice president of Mecon Industries Limited. “But anyone who makes stamped parts from metal is our client. You can have office furniture makers, appliance manufacturers, people that make air conditioning equipment.”

The plant is located in an area that used to have a lot of automotive and other manufacturing activity. “The GM van assembly plant was right here. We did a lot of work for them,” he says. As plants closed, Mecon moved further afield to find customers. “A lot of the plants are still here but they are not doing much. An area that is coming back is Ohio and Michigan.”

Norman sees no reason to join the flight of manufacturing and relocate his shop. They have a 45,000 square foot plant that employs 25 people. “We have a good spot here. We have a good building, a good facility, and there are a lot of big advantages of building in Canada, and in Toronto,” he says. “We have a well-educated workforce. We have a good and secure environment to work in.

There are a lot of good reasons for us to be here.” With customers in the United States, Mexico and even in Europe, Norman does not see the distance to customers as a great obstacle, although he admits it does make sales and support more difficult.

Using coiled steel is beneficial for manufacturers with long production runs. “Where you are making parts in the 5,000 and up range, there are lots of savings to be had by not having to constantly start and stop and handle sheets of metal,” says Norman. “Coil processing means you can set up once and then run a lot of weight of material for many, many hours without doing setup change. It means you can do high volumes of parts with a very small amount of labour input. The stamping process is very fast as compared to some of the cutting processes. With stamping you can produce parts at 60 strokes per minute.” Before using coiled steel, it must be straightened, and this is where Mecon’s expertise lies. “You start from coil, you need to unwind it somehow, that is where we come in,” he says. “Our machine unwinds the coil, conditions it to take out the curve, and we have a machine that will feed it into the next process. So if you dial 12 inches, the machine will give you exactly 12 inches within a thousandth of an inch—every time you ask for it.” Mecon’s coil handlers can feed a press, laser cutter, torch, shear or any other sheet metal tool.

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The goal of the conditioning is to get the metal sheet flat, especially if it’s producing blanks which will be stacked up. Mecon’s systems can handle coiled metal from one-inch thick to material that is about only three thicknesses of paper. There are two types of systems for unrolling coiled steel. In one the coil reel locks the coil in the centre and then rotates it like a spool. The other is a cradle system with the coil resting on rollers and the force rotating the coil comes from the rollers. “The problem with the cradle is that you are rolling on the outside surface which is the working surface, so there is a risk of contamination, marking or rubbing,” says Norman. “So it is not a good choice when things have to be perfectly smooth. If you are making outside car parts and they will be painted with gloss paint any mark will show, so you need to run the coil with a different process, something that holds the coil from the inside and does not have a chance to mark it from the outside.” The biggest challenge the coil handling industry is facing now is adapting to new stronger and lighter materials being used in the auto industry. The newer car parts are being made with steel that has more carbon and other alloying elements in them. They have much stronger mechanical properties and they act quite different, explains Norman.

“We are engineers and we understand the material, and we will design the machines differently to handle the hard and strong materials. What harder and stronger means is that you have to bend it further to actually straighten it.”

The way Mecon’s straightening machine works is by bending the metal back and forth as it passes over a series of rollers. “With harder material the old straighteners may not have any influence on these new materials. They worked well on 1/8-inch mild steel, but now with the harder material they cannot push the 1/8-inch to a small enough radius to actually bend it,” he says. “So with the hard material you need a different straightener.”

Coil handling equipment, especially straighteners, is not a one solution fits all system. Each system Mecon builds is customized to that customer’s requirement.

According to Norman, there are several different details that you need to know, the material thickness, material width, the minimums and maximums, and the hardness of the material.

“We generally ask for the specifications and we look at all the materials they run and look at our straighteners to see what is the best compromise for all that will give them the best performance,” he says.

The process is not as simple as unrolling the coil and passing the metal through some rollers to make it straight. One of the challenges when starting to straighten the metal is that the material characteristics can change, depending on the type of material. This means that you really need to be careful not to overwork it, especially in the straightener.

“Depending on what you are trying to do with the steel after in the press, if you are making a deep draw, making a cup shape, that material has got to go from a circle and get drawn into a cup, so that is deforming a lot in the forming process,” says Norman.

“The materials must also have the properties that allow it to flow into the new shape—that would be a special type of steel that is developed that would allow it to draw like that. If we did too much straightening and worked that material that would change the mechanical properties that didn’t allow it to flow then we have done too much and you would end up with cracking in that draw.”

As the North American and world economies slowly begin to move forward, Norman sees a positive future.

Manufacturing, especially in the auto sector, is bouncing back. “There is a point where buying a coil of material and processing it into many pieces makes sense. There is a point before that where buying cut sheets from a steel service centre made sense,” he says. “The high production in making tubing or making pipe or making auto parts is where you are trying to get 5,000 parts out of an eight hour shift and you are trying to do that three times a day, 200 days a year. That is high production and that’s the way auto parts are made. If you tried doing them in a different way you would never be able to afford the price of a car.”