The Challenge

One of the largest manufacturers of campers worldwide, based in Indiana, USA, reached out to us to develop and construct a hot air welding machine that will produce camper awnings in high volumes. The seams had to be aesthetically pleasing and especially very strong to withstand the tension on the awning surface, including the fact that the produced awnings would be opened and closed an infinite number of times.

The Solution

Based on the concept of our multi-sealer SM-450-SA, we designed a multiple welding-head machine with hot air technology. The machine feeds the PVC-coated fabric from a heavy duty motorized unwinding station, with automatic edge correction and digital fabric tension control.

To increase the efficiency of our customer’s manufacturing process and reduce down time, we built an unwinding system to accommodate two jumbo rolls, so that when the first roll finishes, the operator can immediately insert the second roll and continue the welding cycles. While the second roll is being processed, the first roll can then be substituted.

High-speed manufacturing.

We installed two high-power welding heads on the left and right side of the tool bridge to fold the fabric into a pocket and insert the core that is used to attach the fabric to the awning structure. As the machine works at very high speeds (up to 15 m/m), we integrated an accumulator before the cross-cutting station so that the machine does not have to stop or slow down but can continue the welding process during the cut.

Additionally, we designed the cutting tool to cut in both directions (left to right and right to left) to avoid it from having to make a back-and-forth motion that would add a few seconds to the cycle time.

The machine was successfully installed in our customer’s main plant in USA in 2017.