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Bespoke reel chuck design
Past and satisfactory experience prompted a leading manufacturing company to contact us when a demanding application required a bespoke design for safety chucks and lightweight, but high–carrying capacity, air shafts.
Unusually, because of size restraints, the chuck drive needed to be mounted in–board of the main machine frame to significantly reduce the overall length of the chuck/drive mechanism. This required a completely new design to satisfy the exacting specification.
Past experience again played a part when we approached Jarshire Limited to work with us on the project. In turn, Jarshire consulted their Italian principal Svecom who, over the last 30 years, have advanced the design of air shafts and chucks. With close co–operation all round, a design was achieved that not only met the exact application but also proved to be competitively priced.
Due to the high shaft loadings and resulting manual handling issues, Svecom high strength, lightweight multi–bladdered, ledge row shafts were the best choice to carry the reels of material. The safety chucks chosen were of Svecom’s 925 series with sliding locking plates rather than a tilt ring to lock the shafts in. High–speed quality bearings were fitted to the chucks and the jaws of the chucks were of a round and a square design – this eliminating end–float and chatter, whilst producing a quieter running chuck with far less wear on journals and chuck jaws. As both the safety chucks and shafts were coming from one supplier, it was also possible to machine both the jaws and shaft journals to take account shaft deflection due to the heavy reel weight – this preventing the possibility of safety chuck jamming and operators having to use a hammer to open them.
With our designers monitoring the whole design process to ensure smooth integration into our specialist fabric–splicing machine, the successful result showed the benefit of specialist companies working together to meet a customer’s needs.
