For some reason northern Indiana, USA is home to a number of copper and brass fitting manufacturers and I have done work for a number of them.
Because the work tends to be high volume (otherwise you can't make enough $) the machines tend to be very specific for each fitting or range of fittings. One company has a huge hydroforming machine (10+ meters tall) just to swage (sp?) out copper fittings from 1-4" in diameter. But when times were good that machine ran 24 hrs per day. Right now I think it is running 8 hours per day. Volumes are in thousands of parts per hour on a typical machine... China is a very organized country and they have been found to target certain manufacturers overseas to kill off the competition so they can takeover. A good example is iron pipe fittings in the US. You have to look really hard to find iron pipe fitting that are still made in the US. The Chinese flooded the market with low cost (and oftentimes low quality) fittings and they have pretty much killed US production of iron fittings. They have almost done the same thing with brass valves here also, but the quality of a lot of the valves and the iron fittings are really low. The US government, as usual, has put their hands over their eyes to such matters while they utter "we don't want to make those here anyways ..." Somehow many of the US based copper and brass fitting makers continue to hold on, but many are close to going under. A lot of the "new" fitting for Pex, and the newer push lock fittings are the US makers attempt to come up with more innovative solutions to fight the proliferation of dirt cheap Chinese made fittings.... Dave On 1/1/2010 5:46 AM, Steve Blackmore wrote: > On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:58:27 -0800, you wrote: > > > >> I thought a pipe threader might be a simple application, but it too has >> the part flip or dual spindle problem. I wonder how the current pre-made >> pipe sections are made. To me, it's bazaar to think that it is cheaper >> to have someone in China cut and thread pipe and ship it to the other >> side of the world. I wonder where these products usually come from. >> > Yes - it is cheaper to have them made in China, I've worked for a couple > of pipe fitting manufacturers, all have gone bust. > > Brass fittings are made from castings or forgings. The machining was > done with custom automatic Swiss type lathes. They can bore out a 3/4 > fitting , and cut a thread at better than one per second. > > >> The black and galvanized pipe fittings tend to be fairly large so the >> part primitives would be fairly large and take a long time to machine. >> > What do you call a long time? > > Took 5 seconds for 3inch BSP thread in steel on our old threading > machines. > > Steve Blackmore > -- > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community > Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support > A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy > Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers > http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
