FabShop Magazine - March 2012 - 26

››› Punching
same temperature, only has a yield of about 65 percent. So instead of beer being poured down the drain because it turns to foam, the restaurant makes more money from the keg beer, as it’s in liquid form,” he says. The operator will get 20 percent to 30 percent more yield out of each keg that is poured out of the Chill·Rite32 system. That increase in yield translates into thousands of dollars in increased profit from beer sales each year. Typically, the Chill·Rite32 Systems pay for themselves in less than six months, remarks Abraham. Manufacturing At first when Abraham worked out of his garage, his manufacturing consisted of using a lot of hand tools. Abraham had to discover creative ways of bending tubing. For his sheet metal parts, he drew up the parts and then took them to a sheet-metal job shop that converted them to CAD drawings, so they could be punched or cut out on their equipment. “But this didn’t work well, because I had pricing and quality issues that I couldn’t control. Then if I wanted to move a hole from one area to another, because I was changing a design on the fly, the adjustment took an act of Congress to get my supplier to do it. So I knew at some point in time I would have to bite the bullet and make an investment for manufacturing equipment,” he says. However, to manufacture the Chill·Rite32 system, Abraham had to understand how to produce sheet-metal parts. “I didn’t have anybody to take me under their wing to teach me to produce good sheet-metal parts. I had a serious learning curve. I went to a used equipment dealer and bought a very old Strippit punch press that was built in the late 1960s. I ended up modifying it with a material positioning system to make it more productive. I struggled with my bend allowances for forming the sheet metal, and a great deal of it was nothing more than trial and error. For my first year I ended up throwing away more material than I used for my product. “Then once I got past this curve, even though it was slow using older equipment, we were able to produce a decent product,” he says. “Manufacturing my system was a tremendous investment for me,” mentions Abraham.” After about three years of experimenting with its construction and patenting it, he made a commitment and purchased property to manufacture it in Slidell, La. In 2005 Katrina hit his area and most of his staff lost their homes, including Abraham, but it spared his business facility. “Right around this time I purchased a new Strippit P1212 Punch Press and some other equipment, such as a new Haco press brake. From this point on, we really accelerated our growth and our manufacturing capabilities.” Why lVd/strippit? Abraham looked at other manufacturers for a punch press. But he felt that after reviewing what other companies offered, LVD stood out, as the equipment was price competitive and the company “has been in the punching business for 40 years,” he mentions. “I felt that within this segment of the industry, LVD produced a good, solid product for a reasonable price. Their area representative, Jerry Benning, called on me and took me through Strippit’s facility in Akron, N.Y. He showed me how their punch presses were built, which made me more comfortable with a purchase like this, because this was a large investment for me. Now that I look back at it, it was the best investment I ever made, but I was scared to make it, as you just don’t know what the future could hold. “The LVD punch press has given me punching speed, exceptional part accuracy, repeatability and the ability to be flexible to change

Changing tooling in the Strippit punch is fast and easy, mentions the operator.

Strippit’s P1212 Punch Press

FabShop Magazine - March 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of FabShop Magazine - March 2012