Unison wins $2.5m bending machine order

Scarborough-based Unison has won an order worth over $2.5m to supply tube-bending machinery to Northrop Grumman Newport News for aircraft carrier production.

The order, for three of Unison’s Breeze machines to bend tubes of up to 15cm in diameter, plus tooling and spares, is the company’s largest to date. It was secured in conjunction with the company's USA partner, Horn Machine Tools, with delivery due to start in April 2007.

The machinery will provide the shipbuilder with the means to fabricate the shaped tube parts required for ships’ systems. As each section of the aircraft carrier is built, the data for each part in that section will be downloaded automatically from the design database.

Unison's machines are all-electric, using servo motors to control the bending process, rather than manually-controlled hydraulics. According to Unison, this provides very precise bending under software control, allowing each operation to be configured automatically from downloaded design data, and repeatedly replicated as required. The technology is suitable for the small batch production environment of shipbuilding, where many component parts are fabricated in very small quantities.