Division8 - Curtainwall Blog

We contacted the five manufacturers we had identified and invited them out to our office to discuss the equipment they offered.  We thought we knew what we were looking for, but it is always best to get additional opinions from the people who really know their industry.  The difficulty was finding people who really knew our industry.  Most companies focus on the fenestration business because it really lends itself to automation.  Fenestration companies that manufacture operable vents have limited numbers of profiles in a specific number of colors.  The windows are all manufactured the same with the exception of sizing.Curtainwall on the other hand has a limitless number of profiles with unlimited color options and is rarely manufactured the same way on any two projects.  Most projects have their own unique set of design parameters and the projects are large enough that creating a completely custom system with 80 new dies is actually very common.

Most of the sales reps that came out to visit did not understand this.  They had not really sold much to the curtainwall industry and their input was less than helpful.  Elumatic is probably the most familiar with what we do, but they were new to the machining center world.   When we did our analysis, a lot of time was being spent in between activities.  You might have a cutting station, a drilling station and a notching station.  Each activity was pretty efficient, but it took time to move parts from one area to another and to be sure the right parts received the right fabrication.  Our vision was to eliminate these steps and be able to fabricate an entire stock length into multiple parts in one step.
Elumatic kept pushing their SBZ150 machine because they had sold a lot of these in the past.  The problem is that you have to pre-cut the parts before the 150 can do the holes and notches.  We didn’t want to add this step.  Mubea and Emmegi had machines that could process an entire stock length.  Elumatic had one also, but they had never sold one in the states.

In the end, we based our decision on which company could meet our needs, not only today, but in the future.  We weren’t looking at this as purchasing a piece of machinery, but as purchasing our first piece of machinery.  Emmegi had the best track record and was the most familiar with our industry.  They had an amazing array of equipment and a huge company to back it up.  After visiting their showroom in New Jersey and visiting several of their customers, we knew they were the company for us.

The first step in our process was to define the scope of the changes.  We do a mix of stick built, field assembled curtain wall systems and shop assembled unitized curtain wall systems.  Our first task was to decide what our focus would be.  We have two shops in Fremont.  Shop A is located directly on the property of our main office.  We do most of our field assembled fabrication here.  We have also fabricated most of our stock length material for our unitized curtainwall systems in this building.  Shop B is located just down the street (actually adjacent to our precast facility) from shop A.  This facility has more open space and also quite a bit more yard space.  We have been doing our unitized assembly in this building.After much discussion, we decided to focus on our unitized curtain wall fabrication.  We are doing more and more unitized work lately.  This is due to the fact that our company is growing rapidly, both in terms of size and geography.  We are doing more urban high-rise construction today than we ever did in the past.  This type of work is more condusive to unitized construction. We split the task into three groups.  One group would work on how we would receive and stage our stock length material and glass from our vendors.  The second group would focus on the equipment and fabrication of the stock lengths.  The third group would look at the assembly glaze process.  The goal is to be able to fabricate, assemble and glaze two projects concurrently in shop B.  We need to complete approx. 30 units per day per project. My group is working on the fabrication portion of the project.  We began by doing some research on the different major equipment manufacturers for our industry.  The goal was to contact these companies and get a representative to come out and discuss their products with us.  This way they could see first hand what we are doing and make suggestions on the type of equipment they could supply. Our feeling is that we needed some type of machining center.  This is a multi-axis CNC machine that can fabricate the long lengths (approx. 24′-0″ to 30′-0″) aluminum extrusions. After much research, the companies we fould were: Elumatec – Germany FOM – Italy Mubea – Belgium Emmegi – Italy Tekna – Italy