Need a Lift?: Testing & Quality Assurance

By Eriez Manufacturing Co.

Family-owned and -operated since 1968, Brannon Steel has built a strong reputation as one of North America’s premier suppliers of carbon steel parts to print. The company provides parts to a broad array of industries, including off-road construction, railroad, agricultural, material handling, defense, energy, forestry and mining.

Brannon Steel’s 200,000-sq.-ft. facility in Brampton, Ontario, houses state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, giving the capacity and redundancy to ensure an uninterrupted supply of parts. The company has become well known for its wide range of capabilities, such as beveling, flame cutting, high-definition plasma cutting, laser cutting, plasma bevel cutting, saw cutting, cleaning and packaging, forming and flattening.

The business is dedicated to quality and safety in all areas. This commitment includes selecting only the most advanced equipment and machinery for use at the facility. When the company needed a lift magnet for its plasma cutting table, management chose a Burn Table Full-Coverage Lift Magnet System from Eriez Manufacturing Co. in Erie, Pennsylvania. Purchaser Dave Lee of Brannon Steel said the powerful magnet has exceeded expectations since its installation in September 2018.

Eriez Manufacturing’s air-operated Burn Table Full-Coverage Lift Magnet System utilizes a large, full-contact magnetic surface area to move multiple cut parts from the burn table in a single lift. Image courtesy of Eriez Manufacturing

“Brannon Steel (had) been cutting strips out of a 60″×360″ sheet of 3/16″-thick steel,” he said. “These strips (ranged) in widths from 6″ to 12″, usually almost the full 360″ length. (We’d) been using Eriez APL lift magnets with great success for quite some time for most of our other cutting tables, but they weren’t really appropriate for this particular application due to the thin steel and long, flexible parts. We contacted the Eriez sales office to see what alternatives they may have, and they introduced us to their full-coverage system.”

Once the companies discussed installation requirements, operating procedures and safety benefits of the system, the full-coverage lift magnet was suited perfectly for the facility and operational needs. However, Brannon Steel’s due diligence didn’t stop there. The organization investigated other magnet system suppliers to determine whether any could provide a competitively priced system with the features and performance offered by Eriez Manufacturing.

Performance

“After more research, we decided to go forward with Eriez,” Lee said. “The past performance of Eriez’s smaller permanent lift magnets and history of stellar customer service gave us all the confidence we needed. We knew we would receive a quality product and solid local after-sales support from Eriez.”

When the new system arrived, it was integrated into crane controls.

“We started seeing the benefits almost immediately,” Lee said. “The operators were able to not only clear the cut parts off the table much more efficiently and safely, but they also loaded full sheets onto the table with the same performance.”