In the past, before the extensive use of CNC punch presses, to process sheet metal a guillotine would have been used to cut all our component blanks to size. We would have sheared the blanks and then pierced the holes and slots with fly presses and then notched the corners if required ready for bending.
We then had small CNC punch press in the 1980’s and 1990’s which could only process sheet metal panels that were a maximum of 750mm x 750mm so again our Safan guillotine was a vital piece of equipment in cutting down the standard sheets into smaller panels that were more manageable for CNC punching. Now we have 2 Trumpf CNC punch presses that can process the standard sheets sizes, 2Mx1M and 2.5Mx1.25M in all ferrous and non-ferrous materials. This has led to a reduction of guillotining required in order to process standard sheet metal components.
We do however; have to use our Safan guillotine for components that still cannot be processed by CNC punching. This may be cutting spring stainless steel for small spring clips or trimming back some CNC nibbled edges to have a continual clean edge for instance on electronics front panels. We also use our Safan guillotine to cut small panels when we need to CNC punch only a few components for a small order.
With numerically controlled (NC) back gauges we can cut sheet metal from 0.3mm – 5mm thick, up to 2.5M long with an accuracy of +/- 0.1mm.