Tring Corporation, Orrville, Ohio, has partnered with furnace builder Seco/Warwick Corp., Meadville, Pa., to design an automated system for hot forming hole saw blades that incorporates a custom rotary hearth furnace. Automated blade forming equipment has been a Tring specialty for more than 10 years. The company also provides other custom automation equipment, conveyors and other material handling equipment, and machining and fabrication services.

In the saw blade forming system, straight blades are loaded into slots in the furnace’s hearth, and are then heated to the appropriate temperature for forming. An unloader then grasps blades one at a time and places them in water-cooled dies, where they are formed into various sizes of hole saws.

The custom Seco/Warwick furnace is 1 m (42 in.) in diameter and can handle blades up to 15 cm ( in.) in diameter. Furnace features include ceramic fiber blanket insulation and an indexer rather than a complex servo drive. A single PLC monitors the entire operation. Its operator interface is used to check system status and control loader/unloader operation, furnace temperature, hearth indexing, atmosphere, die cooling, and former.

Ting also offers sawmakers a dual-load configuration, which can be retrofit. Throughput can be doubled and blades of more than one size can be formed at the same time by using two loaders and two unloaders with one furnace.