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A coil of 1.5 mm steel strip, 500 millimetres wide, quickly weighs 800 kilograms. It has to travel from the storage bay to the decoiler, be held level there and pushed onto the mandrel – without the strip edge touching anything.
Pick the coil up, travel to the decoiler, bring it to mandrel height, align it and push it on. The clearance between bore and mandrel is often under two centimetres; start at an angle and it jams. On a crane the coil hangs from one point and swings – exactly what pushing on will not tolerate. Then there is the edge: a damaged strip start does not feed cleanly into the die and costs the first metres.
A coil or expanding mandrel takes the bore and carries the coil there. The strip stays untouched, and the pick-up sits automatically in the axis where the decoiler mandrel will be. External clamps do the opposite: they press on exactly the surface that later runs through the die. The expanding mandrel locks mechanically and reports its state – at 800 kilograms, holding by friction is not an option.
On a rope the coil hangs at its centre of gravity and tips as soon as it is disturbed. When pushing onto the mandrel that is precisely the fault. A unit with a guided axis – a rail system with rotator or a slewing crane with a rigid mount – keeps the bore in one plane, and the operator pushes the coil on with a few newtons. What takes three attempts on a crane becomes one movement.
Coil store, decoiler and stacking point almost always lie one behind the other. A monorail system above that line serves all three points without needing slewing space and does not compete with the overhead crane, which stays free for the heavy exceptions. Payload follows from the heaviest regularly changed coil plus the mandrel – not from the one outlier a year.
The jointed arm for millimetre-precise handling.
View device Lifting equipment · Crane systemsWide reach by slewing around the column.
View device Lifting equipment · Conveyor systemsThe whole area covered – in X and Y.
View deviceThe C-hook carries the coil but does not guide it. While pushing onto the mandrel the bore has to stay in one plane; on a hook it tips the moment you push. For transport the C-hook is fine, for the last half metre it is not.
The heaviest regularly changed coil plus the pick-up – an expanding mandrel weighs 40 to 90 kg depending on design. The overhead crane stays for the rare exception above that; sizing a unit for the extreme case makes the everyday change expensive and sluggish.
Yes, because the expanding mandrel locates positively in the bore and does not rely on friction. That is exactly why external clamps and magnets are ruled out with oiled strip.
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Start typing – for example “balancer”, “SAP” or “pipe stress”.
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