Frank Trusty, Senior Buyer
Southern Fabricators, Inc. Memphis, TN

Southern Fabricators is the largest metal fabricating shop south of Chicago. They are a big supplier to over the road truck trailer manufacturers, as well as to locomotive, marine power plant, freight handling equipment and school bus manufacturers. The company has 800 employees.

“ We make a lot of big heavy stuff...16 ga. is almost sheet metal to us. Normal is 14 ga. and a good bit of 1/2 inch materials, some stainless. We build most of our own dies, also have four lasers, turret presses, turret-laser combos, extensive welding and painting facilities. But unitized tooling accounts for 75% of the way we punch holes.”

With all of the resources you have in house, how do you use Unipunch tooling?
“ We use unitized tooling in our normal day to day operations where there is a lot of punching, a lot of repetition. We just set up the UniPunch tooling on a template and go to town and punch it. We use the turret presses for the smaller jobs and the larger sheets where you really can’t get to it with the unitized tooling."

" The plant superintendent has to look at the loads he has on all of the machines, how many pieces he has to turn out. We have our own programming staff on hand and they can punch out a program for the turrets pretty quick, but where you have numerous pieces to punch, several hundred or a thousand, it is just more economical to run it on the unitized tooling. You just make a setup and you can whip those parts out real quick."

" We do have some setups that are dedicated to particular jobs that are repetitive."

" Time plays a big part in the decision to use unitized tooling. Cost is another. The cost of the UniPunch tooling is usually less than it is for the turret. With a turret you’re hitting one hole at a time. With unitized you may want several holes or various sizes and with one hit of the press you’re done. We get a lot of the jobs because of the speed that we can turn things over."

“ When you can punch numerous holes at one lick instead of waiting for a turret to go through the process one hole at a time...unitized tooling is a lot more convenient, quicker and a lot more economical."

“ It depends on the size of the part and the number of holes. “If you have a large sheet with a few holes, the turret is about the only way to go. When you have numerous holes in a part, the unitized tooling is the way to go. If you’re making 50 to 100 parts, make a setup of unitized tooling, get the parts knocked out and be done with it."

What is your turret time worth an hour?
“ Turret / laser combo time is charged at about $166 per hour."

Does your investment in unitized tooling give you more turret time for the specialized, large sheet work?
“ We take work off the turrets wherever possible. Most of our turret parts have laser or plasma cuts and contours. In some cases, small lot sizes. We can burn those holes on the laser and get great quality. The speed is really not there with the laser but in small lot sizes it works. When you have a lot of parts, unitized tooling is really the most economical."

How large a part can you make using UniPunch tooling?
“ We’ve got one mechanical press -- 24 foot long --1,500 ton. On some of the larger parts we’ll run 20 to 24 feet long using unitized tooling. It’s not unusual for us to run 8, 10, 12, 14, 16-foot-long parts. A lot of the over the road trailer parts are so repetitive that we’ve got some of the setups that are pretty much permanently mounted just to hold the UniPunch tooling. And if we need to change punches, dies or springs, we can change them right on the press without taking the whole setup off."

You have your own die makers in house. How do make the
determination to make a hard die to make a certain part?
“ There again it depends on the complexity of the part and the number of parts. If you’re going to be running certain parts...where you are going to be running thousands of them...then you might be able to justify building a hard die. But if you are going to be running 1,000 or 2,000 over the course of a year, it would take you forever to recoup your costs for a hard die so you can certainly use your unitized tooling to an advantage there. You can’t always put the price of the die set into the part.”

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