Over 20,000 tons of material await further processing in the warehouses of Schmolz + Bickenbach Stahlcenter AG, or Schmobi for short, in Wil. The company, which was founded in the eastern Swiss canton of St. Gallen, has an extensive material warehouse with modern high-bay warehouses, a high-performance machine park and a fully automated sawing center. Every day, around 100 employees sell, process and assemble numerous materials in an area of 25,000 m². The assortment ranges from bright steel, engineering steel, steel tubes, tool steel and cast iron to rust-resistant stainless steel and stainless steel tubes through to aluminum. The employees pack the finished orders and then deliver them to customers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein using the company's own fleet of trucks - "just in time".

2.5 million blanks per year

Over 10,000 blanks a day - that's around 2.5 million a year - are sawn on over 30 machines in Wil. "Our order items include both large series of over 10,000 pieces and orders from batch size 1," explains Thomas Plüss, Head of Communications at Schmobi. Due to staggered working hours, the steel trading company has a working day of around ten hours. This means high capacity utilization of the machines, some of which also run overnight. "The demands on our saws are enormous. That's why we need machines that can process workpieces with different diameters quickly, cleanly and economically and, above all, that work reliably and without errors," says plant manager Robert Schönenberger, explaining the requirements.

The automatic saw is partly loaded with the aid of a magnet system. The feed magazine has space for several bars. This allows the band saw to run unmanned for a longer period of time. © Kasto mechanical engineering

Schmobi uses three saws from Kasto Maschinenbau for processing bar material made of steel, cast iron and aluminum. The latest is the Kastotec FC 4, a fully automatic high-performance band saw that has been in operation for over a year and is suitable for cutting round, square and flat material as well as tubes and profiles. At that time, those responsible decided to replace two existing machines. "The demand for fixed blanks has risen continuously in recent years and the performance of the two existing saws was no longer sufficient," explains Schönenberger. Schmobi therefore invested in the new machine, which can easily cope with the growing requirements. "We already had two Kasto models in operation and were very satisfied with them. That made the decision to purchase another machine from the supplier very easy," recalls Schönenberger.

Economical sawing of difficult-to-machine materials

The Kastotec FC 4 is suitable for difficult-to-cut materials such as stainless steel or tool steel. Its cutting range is 430 mm × 430 mm with a smallest dimension to be cut of 10 mm × 10 mm. With the Kasto Performance Cutting (KPC) equipment variant, the band saw is also predestined for the use of carbide saw bands, which enable particularly long service lives. "The Kastotec FC 4 has a precision of up to +/- 0.1 mm per 100 mm cutting length. The cutting speed is up to 180 m/min," explains Michael Maurath, sales manager at Kasto. Schmobi also benefits from these properties: "With the Kastotec FC 4, we can saw different materials and diameters extremely economically. The minimum offcut length in automatic mode is only around 35 mm. This allows us to use our material efficiently," says Kurt Thoma, group leader of the sawmill at Schmobi, describing the added value of the new saw.