Amada America Opens Manufacturing Plant in North Carolina
Seventeen months after breaking ground, Amada America officially opened its 190,000 square foot Carolina Manufacturing Center in High Point in North Carolina. Another building on the campus, the 62,000 square foot Carolina Technical Center, will open in 2020. The North Carolina campus has Amada’s third manufacturing facility in the US. The opening follows another manufacturing expansion earlier in 2019, when Amada Tool America completed a 19,000 square foot addition to its existing plant in Batavia in New York. In 2013 the company opened a laser cutting machine manufacturing plant in Brea in California.
The plant now employs a little more than 50 people, and the company expects employment to rise as it ramps up production of its HRB, short for Hybrid Retrofittable Bending machine. The plant will produce both stand-alone HRB press brakes as well as an HRB with an automatic tool changer. Both HRB models have options, like special gauging or sheet followers that fabricators can add at the time of purchase or choose to add later. Assembly cells down the central aisles are equipped with wheeled carts holding kits of parts and tools, and everything can be wheeled to other locations as needed.
Most critically, the plant’s largest equipment, including a double-column bridge mill, paint booths, and blasting booth, has excess space and capacity. The blast booth alone, an automated system with a massive turntable, has the capacity to fit a complete laser machine frame on it. In the future, should laser machine production expand beyond Amada’s Brea plant, the North Carolina plant is designed to be able to absorb the demand and tool up for laser machine production.
All welding cells are set up with local fume extraction, and one welding cell has a massive, 12,000-pound-capacity positioner, similar to one used at Amada’s plant in Japan. Thanks to quick positioning, employees can weld an entire press brake side plate within a few hours.
Both prepaint blast and cleaning booths have reclamation systems that significantly reduce waste. About 95% of cleaning solution is filtered and used again. The blast booth has an automated reclamation system with an elevator that carries blast media back to the storage hopper. All this not only produces less waste from an environmental perspective, but also frees more available production capacity for future expansion.
Source : Strategic Research Institute