Sheet Metal Fabrication

High-mix job shops live or die on setup time and material yield. LaserPeak sheet, tube and welding platforms put automatic cross-order nesting, one operator interface and burr-free edges behind every part number — from 1.5 mm cosmetic panels to 16 mm structural work.

What this sector needs

The challenge

Sheet metal fabrication is a high-mix, low-volume business. A typical job-shop week holds 40 to 80 different part numbers, most of them a handful of sheets, and every one of them carries its own programme.

The economics break in two places. First, setup: a CNC punch or laser needs a nest, a programme and a first-article check for each of those part numbers, and setup can consume 30–50% of available machine hours. Second, material: on a mixed nest with mixed thickness, the drop zone and skeleton waste is where the margin quietly disappears.

Cutting quality on thin material is the third problem. On 1–3 mm stainless and aluminium, a guillotine sheared edge leaves a visible burr and a rolled edge that finishing crews grind by hand. On 3–8 mm mild steel, plasma leaves dross that has to be chipped and deburred before welding or powder coating.

Elevator cabin and door panels add a finishing detail: a continuous hairline polish along the cut edge, achieved by hand, at a cost that approaches the cost of the blank itself.

The laser answer

The LP-F1500 Fiber Sheet Cutting Series handles the thin, cosmetic end of the shop where burrs and polish dominate, at a beam quality that leaves a clean edge ready for brushing or polishing with little or no secondary work.

The LP-F3000 Fiber Sheet Cutting Series covers the heavy half of the typical job list — 6 to 16 mm structural and stainless work — with the same control software, the same nesting engine and the same operator interface as the 1.5 kW machine, so a job can move between the two without a different programming environment.

Nesting runs automatically on import, and the layout is chosen from the whole open order book rather than from one job. That is what turns 40–80 part numbers a week from a setup problem into a throughput problem, which is the problem a laser can solve.

For the tube and profile half of a job-shop order book, the LP-T Series Laser Tube Cutting line takes the same job files and the same geometry library. For shops tired of operators loading by hand, the LP-A Series Automated Loading & Unloading attaches to any of these machines and turns the cutting cell into a queue that runs while the shop does something else.

Where welding is part of the same order, the LP-W Series Laser Welding head keeps fabrication and the weld in one workflow, one file and one traceability record.

What customers gain

Setup time down 50–70%

Automatic nesting and one operator interface across the machine fleet remove the manual nest-and-programme step that dominated the job-shop week. Shops running mixed volumes typically cut setup hours by more than half without adding a single machine.

3–8 points of material yield

Cross-order nesting across the open order book, plus true-shape nesting that uses the skeleton between holes and internal corners, typically lifts material yield by 3–8 percentage points. On 300 tonnes of sheet a year, this is the fastest return in the building.

Edges that need less finishing

A dross-free, burr-free edge from the laser removes most hand deburring and grinding hours and shortens the path from cut to powder coat. Fabricators report 20–35% less finishing labour per part on 1–6 mm work.

One file, one traceability record

Cutting, tube preparation and welding drawing from the same geometry library means a revision on the drawing reaches every downstream operation. Revision-related rework — the most expensive error in a job shop — largely disappears.