Mark Reed
Technical Rep
Magni-Fab, Southwest Company Howe, TX

Magni-Fab is a custom sheet metal shop, manufacturing parts for Peterbilt Trucks, Lucent and many other companies. They are known for close tolerance, high quality parts.

“ There will always be a place for C-Frame Tooling in metal manufacturing”

“ We use UniPunch tooling for angle iron and flat bar. On certain jobs...jobs like flat bar work...500 parts...each with five holes...it’s faster to set up UniPunch tooling...one hit and you’re done...than it is to use a CNC turret."

“ If we are going to be making a lot of parts, say 50,000 parts a year or 1,000 parts a week...we can’t run that across our CNC so we will build a die. But sometimes, if you have a piece of bar stock with four or five holes in it, and you need 1,000 parts a week, it is cheaper to use UniPunch tooling than to build hard tooling for it."

“ We’re making a windshield mullion for Peterbilt that is a 3/4-inch wide strip, half round, and we use modified UniPunch pedestal dies to punch holes down through it. There is really no other way we could make that part."

“ There will always be a place for C-Frame Tooling in metal
manufacturing. It’s something you just can’t get rid of. Unitized tooling is still cheaper in the long haul than buying capital equipment that can only be used to run one or two jobs.”

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