Shears, the first cousin of the venerable press brake, are commonly referred to as the “back bone” of the fab shop. (Maybe we should bump up the status of the shear to “little brother” to the press brake.) From light-duty fab shops to medium-duty fab shops to the heaviest of heavy-duty fab shops, one thing is identical in each operation: they all get their material in sheets. Sheets of this, sheets of that, every type and size of metal that can practically be moved, comes in a sheet. That makes the shear a pretty popular machine tool around a shop of any size.
In a rather unusual way, one could compare the metal shear to (of all things) a band saw! What’s the connection there? In the fab shop, the shear is typically the first machine to touch the material as it was received from the mill, right? You have to cut down the sheet of material to the needed part size to proceed with the production process. Likewise, in the chip making business, where either solids or tubes or shapes are being cut, the band saw is the first machine to touch that industry’s raw material. So, although they both do drastically different things, in a way they are the same, as producers of the first cut part in the production process.
Sheet metal guillotine, metal guillotine, metal shear, metal shears, sheet metal shears, shear machine. People from all walks of life call the venerable old shear many different names, but they all mean the same thing. A stand-alone machine that will cut its maximum capacity every time you hit those buttons, and do it faster than any other machine in the shop.
A fairly broad range of metal sheet/plate thicknesses that one could call common place in today’s fabrication industry would be from say 20 gauge to ¾ inch plate. The greatest amount of work that takes place in today’s industry probably falls into that range. Bud’s Machine Tools offerings of all forms of shearing machines easily transcends that range and then some.
From the simplest hand operated machine with all manual adjustments, to the heaviest ship-building size machines, you need only make one call. When Bud's Machine Tools decides to sell a specific type of equipment we go all in. Shears are a very good example of that. From walking around nibbling shears, to throat less bench shears, to stomp shears, we have a wider array of human-powered shears than other suppliers have in shears total! When you get a little bit bigger in machine size and capacity, you then move into the sphere of the mechanical shear. Mechanical shears are nothing more than a shear that is powered via a mechanical action driven by an electric motor. This design of the shear is very practical as it affords the smaller shops an opportunity to own their own shear. Being smaller and lighter gauge machines, the mechanical shear affords a good amount of production, mainly due to its relatively high-speed operation for fabrication companies whose parts fall into that shear's niche. Some popular examples of mechanical shears are bench shears, foot squaring shears, ring and circle shears, and power squaring shears, just to name a few.
Next up the totem pole are the hydraulic shearing machines. Now you get into “man’s country” when you get to these bad boys. Sure, you can get a thin gauge hydraulic shear if you want, you can also get a thick gauge hydraulic shear if you want, a lot thicker gauge shear. As in heavy plate steel. Tell me more about the hydraulic shears, right? These are the big boys of the shear machine family, with longer cut lengths and much thicker capacities, hydraulic shears own the thicker plate shearing operation. We stock hydraulic shears up to ¾ inch capacity and can factory order even thicker capacity machines if needed. Our Hydraulic swing beam or variable rake shears are available in standard lengths as long as 30 feet, and additional length capacity can be had with factory assistance. Some specialized processes such as would take place in a ship yard type operation, where very long and thick shearing is required, some cuts have been as long as 100 feet, and as thick as 2" in low carbon steel plate.
The modern shear offered by Bud's Machine Tools is just as likely to have a CNC controller on it as not. The variable rake shear uses the control to keep constant angles and gaps exactly where they need to be automatically. For both the swing beam and variable rake shear, the system is Windows-based with a touch screen, and can do the math to make sure that you get all the blanks you can from the sheet. They store repetitive jobs in memory for recall at the touch of a button, as well as many other functions, almost too numerous to list here. At Bud's Machine Tools, shears are just one of the many types of both new and used fabrication machines that we can supply. We are in the second generation of machine tools sales here in the Salt Lake Valley, Bryan "Bud" Jorgenson having learned the trade from his father Roger. And like Roger did for all those many years, we here at Bud's strive to offer the very best fabrication machines for the buck, taking care of the customer before, during, and long after the sale.
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