6 April 2025

Spectrum upgrade and retrofit seam welder

Refurbishment and retrofitting tandem head MIG seam welder with new drive system

Discuss client requirements
Meet the customer
Site visit
Problems addressed and solved
Planning and design
Specification
Lead time (back up and running within 4 days from date of order / 2 days downtime)
Build schedule
Delivery, install, commission, test, train.

Our customer had a seam welder production line welder in place that MIG welded all day, all night continuously. This was an old seam welder system with cables everywhere, an antiquated motor gearbox, that ended up cutting out and came to grinding halt in a puff of smoke.

We were then approached as a matter of urgency to get our customer’s longitudinal seam welder production line back up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. Our solution was to rip out all the old bogie carriage drive system and replace all of it with brand new the mechanical and electrical 415V motor gearbox components, including much tidier energy drag chain cable carriers for the pendants controllers and LEV fume extraction.

The customer also needed to control the tandem head MIG seam welder from both sides, so we designed a twin pendant system that allow 2 pendants to be attached to the both sides of the seam welder carriage, so the operators could independently control both MIG heads that we setup for 1.0mm solid wire longitudinal seam welds, and the other side with 1.2mm wire seam welds.

Additional safety systems were also needed including forward & reverse traverse limit switches, emergency stops on the control panel and both pendant controllers, and fume extraction ducting connected to powerful fans with fixed nozzles at the welding source.

We also fitted the new 3-phase 415V 32amp MCB D-rated trip dedicated socket and conduit, so the system had a fresh uninterrupted power supply feed.

By being able to offer our customer this automation retrofit repair and upgrade service, we saved them a lot of money not needing to replace this with a new machine with 12 weeks of downtime.