"Custom Conveyor Corporation designs and builds material handling systems for the Municipal Waste Water market.  This type of conveyor uses a U-Trough to house the screw or auger.  The old process to make these troughs is to use the multiple 5° breaks to create the 180° bend in stainless steel.  This method has several major issues:

• Each time the stainless steel comes in contact with the punch and the die, it imbeds mild steel into the sheet.
• Stainless steel reacts differently sheet to sheet and within a sheet to produce a distorted trough. The trough has to be manipulated to return to the desired shape.
• The process is operator dependent for quality and productivity.

We contacted Polyurethane Products Corp. for a solution to our manufacturing process.  We described our needs and objectives and they had a solution.  We provided test material and they developed the dies and radius punch.  We traveled to Polyurethane Products for a demonstration of the process.  In five minutes, we knew we had the answer to a production bottleneck. 

The new process uses a variety of steel radial punches pressing into a polyurethane bottom die called the SMART PAD SYSTEM.  The small size troughs now require only three strokes to accomplish what took 37 strokes before.  The additional advantage is that our product now has a smooth rolled appearance, rather than the chatter marks of multiple breaks.  This is a great help, as we bend stainless steel up to ¼” thick.  Our productivity has us making the troughs in one-quarter of the time and our fit up is one hour less per trough because the troughs are perfect.

Using steel radius punches by Press Brake Tooling Corp. and the unique SMART PAD SYSTEM by Polyurethane Products Corp., we were able to have a single-source solution for our radius products and greatly improved our productivity."

- Custom Conveyor Corporation