“We had been researching options for some time, but had not yet found what we were looking for. What appealed to me about the rack offered by aalbers|farina? The fact that the sheets are stowed away in drawers. We hadn’t seen anything like this anywhere else. It saves a huge amount of space and really is a compact, efficient rack. Rival systems were considerably larger.”
As an early customer Van den Hout also had the opportunity to shape the development of the sheet metal storage rack, so to speak, on the basis of its own needs. “The initial version still had a separate keyboard, whereas we wanted a touchscreen. So they went off and wrote a program for this. We also wanted a small slewing crane to take sheets from the rack one by one. They also adapted the system to take this into account.”
really efficient
The height was also customised, Van den Hout continues. Laughing: “Our hall is 6.3 metres high and the rack is just 2 centimetres lower. You can use space so efficiently. That was very important for us, as at the time space was already in short supply at our current location. In the near future we will therefore be relocating. Thanks in part to our sheet metal storage rack, we’ve been able to put off this move for five years, but now we really have no choice.”
So it was a good investment? “Yes, for us it certainly was. Perhaps it would be different for a contract cutter that picks out a couple of packs of sheets and can then just get on with cutting them. But in our case there can easily be ten different thicknesses in a single customer order. Without the rack you would have ten forklift operations. That would take much longer and you also run the risk of damage.”
“Being able to respond quickly is extremely important for us”, Van den Hout concludes. “This rack enables us to do that. We can switch from 10 mm steel to 3 mm stainless steel within a minute and then again to 5 mm steel a few minutes later. It’s difficult to put an exact percentage on it, as we have never calculated it, but I’d go as far as to say that, on average, we get twenty per cent more out of our laser-cutting machine every day.”