After cleaning the surface of the steel comes the manufacturing process of cutting & machining.
Here we explore the methods used at Daver Steels for cutting steel, using a variety of different machinery. Selecting the right method will depend on the required accuracy, lead time and costs involved for the size of the project, as well as the grade and thickness of material.
Plasma Cutting
Daver Steels operates a high-definition Hypertherm flatbed plasma cutting machine. This is a 300 amp unit, capable of cutting between 2mm – 50mm thick mild steel and 2mm – 35 mm thick stainless steel.
The machine bed is 8.5m long x 2 metres wide, allowing us to process two plates in tandem, of sizes 4m x 2m. The machine can accept NC1 & DXF file formats direct from the customer (1:1 scale) which aids production & eliminates the potential of human error when redrawing plates for processing.
The mild steel cutting process uses oxygen and air, enabling us to consistently produce bolt-ready holes of 0.7 x material thickness, thanks to the True Hole technology developed by Hypertherm.
90% of everything that is cut on this machine will then be moved on for further processing in the factory.
Laser Cutting
The laser is used to ensure optimal precision and guarantees excellent performance whenever clean cuts and smoother edge finishes are required.
Daver Steels has a 3kw fibre compact Laser capable of cutting thicknesses of 0.8 to 8mm in stainless steel versus 2mm to 10mm in mild steel. We also process Aluminium.
The bed size is 1.5m x 1m and is used mainly in the production of our serrated pads and washers. For more details see Serrated Solutions.
Our newest investment is a U.K built Photon 5G 12kw CNC Fibre Laser Cutter.
With a impressive vector speed of 325m/min this machine is capable of accelerating at 5g. It has a 3m x 1.5m twin rotating shuttle bed which allows the machine to cut whilst the other bed is offloaded safely outside of the cutting area, which is also fantastic for productivity. We are able to cut high precision profiles from 1mm thick upwards.
Sawing
The automatic saw in use at Daver Steels can be set up to cut materials up to 350mm wide x 275mm high with a bevelling capability of up to 45 degrees.
The stock bar length is a maximum of 12 metres. The saw is ideal for cutting multiple runs of short items such as plate for angle or channel brackets and pieces of flat bar.
Shearing
The shearing process allows us to cut plates in carbon, stainless, duplex or Aluminium to our customer’s specific requirements using our CNC guillotine, also known as the shears.
The guillotine works in conjunction with our CNC press brake. Both machines have a capacity of 400 tonnes meaning anything we can shear, we can then also press.
The machine cuts materials from 1mm thick up to 20mm thick in mild steel & up to 15mm thick in stainless steel. Maximum length is dependent on the thickness of the material.
We can cut strips, squares, rectangles, triangles, and trimmed combinations of these. We can trim corners for welded plates and gusset pieces. The guillotined edge will be a sheared edge. The metal edges will be sharp and must always be handled with appropriate PPE. Irregular shapes are best cut on our Hi-Definition plasma machine.
Please contact our sales desk with a drawing for a quotation.
