Project background
Nordwerk Maschinenbau GmbH builds conveyor frames, hopper liners and machine guarding for bulk handling and food processing. The company runs a 4,200 m² plant near Lüdensburg with 120 employees, and it competes on lead time rather than price: most orders leave the building within ten working days.
Tube work was the constraint. Frames are cut from 40–120 mm wall stainless and mild steel tube, and every set-up meant scribing the cut line, marking the tube by hand and clamping each piece on a bandsaw or a copying plasma table. A 320 mm section with four mitred ends took 22 minutes to set up, and the mitre geometry was re-measured for every tube because nothing was dimensionally recorded.
Plate work was outsourced. Laser cutting of hopper liners and 6 mm guarding panels was bought in from a merchant supplier in Poland, with three weeks of lead time and a freight cost that added up on a quarterly 60-tonne plate consumption.
Nordwerk had already evaluated fibre lasers, but two of the three machines on the shortlist were large-format sheet platforms that could not handle tube, and the one tube laser on the list needed a separate handling step for mitred ends.
The challenge
Mitred tube ends had to be scribed and set by hand because the plasma table had no geometric memory. Errors surfaced as gaps at the frame weld, which meant re-cutting and re-filling.
A plate lead time of three weeks made it impossible to quote a one-week build on guarding packages, and roughly 40% of those jobs went to customers who needed a faster answer.
A 4 kW source was the ceiling on the sheet side, but the plate mix included 12 mm 316L — exactly the thickness where plasma was still competitive on cost and where laser quality had to justify the switch.
Our solution
Nordwerk installed an LP-T320-4kW fibre tube laser in February 2025, positioning it in the fabrication area next to the welding bays so that tube goes from cut to fit-up without a second transfer.
Mitre geometry is now driven from the same DXF the welding programmer uses, and the machine writes each set-up back to the job traveller, so the next identical frame starts from recorded dimensions rather than from a fresh measurement.
For plate, an LP-F4020-4kW sheet laser was installed alongside the existing plasma table, which was retained for 20 mm and thicker mild steel and for one-off work that does not justify a laser programme. The laser now takes every 316L part and all work below 8 mm.
The two machines share one operator, one nesting front end and one set of job travellers. Material planning moved from a monthly spreadsheet to a weekly nesting review with the purchasing lead.
Delivered outcome
Tube set-up time fell from 22 minutes to 5 minutes 40 seconds per section, measured across a fortnight of production logging. The elimination of hand scribing removed an entire class of mitre mismatch, and weld gaps on frame ends dropped below the internal 2 mm tolerance on essentially all frames.
Guarding and liner packages that used to take three weeks of supplier lead time now ship in five working days, including the plate, and the company re-quoted the business it had previously lost. Roughly 60% of the previously outsourced plate volume came back in-house in the first two quarters.
Cutting cost per kilogram on 316L fell 31% against the merchant supplier's price, and the two machines together returned their investment in 19 months against the original business case.
The plasma table now carries roughly 60% of its previous workload and is scheduled for sale in 2026 — a change Nordwerk had not planned when the project started.