The result of a £500,000 investment to date, with a further £250,000 spend planned by Christmas 2023, at the heart of the service is a new tooling manufacturing centre at Unison’s Scarborough HQ. From here, fully tailored tooling agreements are prepared and around one hundred thousand pounds worth of tooling, including mandrel balls and wiper dies, is held in stock.
“We’ve been aware of a gap in the consumable bend tooling market for some time,” says Unison sales applications engineer, Luke Gibson. “As such, we wanted to extend our already extensive tooling service to provide even greater convenience to Unison customers, while also giving users of other makes of tube bending machines rapid access to our consumable and long-life products. Equipped with the latest manufacturing technologies, our new tooling centre allows us to do just that.”
By holding pre-agreed stocks of consumable tooling on behalf of its customers, Unison ensures much faster delivery times than for tooling that is made to order. Unison’s consumable tooling agreements enable customers to minimise the volume of tooling they would typically keep on site and benefit from the associated cost savings.
On-demand, next day and scheduled deliveries eliminate the risk of a tooling shortage stopping production and provide the opportunity to standardise tooling across different manufacturing sites. As part of the service, Unison also offers volume discounts and the convenience of easy budgeting through regular payment plans.
“Regardless of a customer’s consumable bend tool requirements, be it wiper dies, mandrel balls or other goods, we’ll create an agreement that meets their needs perfectly,” adds Luke Gibson. “No matter where they’re based, we’ll hold ample stocks of the bend tools they frequently require at one of our UK, USA or partner facilities around the world, for dispatch as and when they’re needed.”
As well as aluminium bronze consumable bend tooling, Unison also produces long-life precision tooling for the most challenging of tool manipulation applications. “Choosing Unison tooling means de-risking your processes, as we ensure every tool fits perfectly and makes parts accurately,” added Luke Gibson.
“We can also customise tool mounts so that new tooling can be used with existing machines, while our quick-change collets and mandrels, and bar-coded tooling further streamline the tube manipulation process and help businesses save time and money.”
