Ultibend lifts productivity with all-electric tube benders

Ultibend Industries, a manufacturer of stainless steel tube fittings for food and beverage processing systems, has boosted its productivity with two all-electric tube bending machines that automate the bending of tube fitting shapes such as elbows and U-bends, in sizes from ½ to 4″ in diameter.

Ultibend’s original hydraulically powered tube bending machines were the heart of their business, but offered only a very basic level of machine and operator control. The company sought to replace them with more flexible, all-electric machines using servomotor-controlled bending.

Unison was selected as the supplier of the customised solution, which has given Ultibend the manufacturing platform to support substantial future growth, including into the USA and other new export markets.

Based in Wellington, New Zealand, Ultibend is known for the high functional quality of its tube fittings, which means that bends are highly uniform. The new machines combine the existing manufacturing techniques with the enhanced productivity of all-electric machine architecture.

The Unison machines speed the bending due to the inherently greater control of motion that’s possible inside the software-controlled, all-electric machine architecture. The software gearbox is able to control and coordinate several axes simultaneously, avoiding the delays of a more mechanical machine such as the latency in response of a slave axis.