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22 June 2010

Carlton laser invests in advanced CNC press brakes from LVD

Continuing with its strategy of investment in technology, market leading subcontractor Carlton Laser Services (C.L.S), Leicester, UK, has placed an order worth £750,000 for three high-performance Easy-Form® Series CNC Press Brakes from LVD, bringing their spend to a total of £2,000,000 over the last 3 years on investment in technology.

Carlton Laser specializes in subcontract manufacturing for many blue chip OEMs in the markets and industries of food sorting machines medical equipment, electronics & electrical cabinets and specialist vehicles components. The company is a trend setter in adopting and applying state of the art sheet metalworking technology.

Realizing the need to address an increasing demand for very high quality, small batch – short lead-time components, Carlton Laser representative’s selected LVD equipment as the best technology to solve current and future sheet metalworking challenges.

Mohan Jassi, Operation Director for Carlton Laser, explains: “We knew we needed to ‘de-skill’ the bending process of very accurate and difficult components ranging from batch quantities of 1 to 100 off’s so we set out to find machinery that had the very best bending technology within the machine. This would allow us to continue to remain a market leader and to grow in the markets we operate in.

Headed up by Mohan Jassi and Carlton’s founder Dennis Kent, the team at Carlton embarked upon a six month investigation of potential suppliers, technology and machines, which consisted of supplier audits, extensive testing of equipment and technology using test parts developed by Carlton, and visits to machinery users.

A final evaluation included extensive bending trials in which assessments were made for ease of use, offline programming capability, pre-production set-up time, production time, and accuracy of parts.
Jassi adds: “Our task was to identify the best press brake and supporting technology on the market. We conclusively found that LVD’s bending technology and the Easy-Form Laser in process angle correction system out performed all of the competition. In fact, the parts produced by LVD with Easy-Form were exceptionally accurate, within our target of +/- 0.4’.”

Carlton’s key consideration was the ability to efficiently process small / medium size batches.
“From how we saw LVD’s Easy-Form system perform during the trials we are more than confident that the first part will be the right part, this will save considerable costs by reduced set up and production times, and a reduction in waste,” concluded Jassi.

The three new machines and accompanying LVD CADMAN offline software are due to be delivered and commissioned in the near future.


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