Salvagnini 30+20 - Jubilee (1963/1993/2013) - Versione inglese E-Book

Mario Marobin

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

When the company was founded in a basement in the Milanese district of Quarto Oggiaro in 1963 to design and construct lubrication units, it is probable that even the engineer Guido Salvagnini didn't realize he was beginning a journey which would be as long and successful as that of the company which still bears his name. This volume does not claim to reconstruct or retell the history of Salvagnini, but is simply a series of memoirs and recollections about people who spent a long time with the company. It comprises an organized collection of memory flashes from a community of men who shared a common passion for a company that was one of a kind and who were attracted and fascinated by the figure of Ing. Guido who was for all of his co-workers a stimulus and, in his own way, a master.

Leseprobe

Dear reader,

These writings do not claim to reconstruct the history of Salvagnini but simply to provide a series of memoirs, recollections, of persons who spent a long time in the company, experiencing the good times but also the sadder and more difficult times. They are memory flashes, collected and organised with patience and skill by Dr. Marobin, from a community of men who shared a common passion for a company that was one of a kind and who were attracted and fascinated by the figure of Engr. Guido who was for all of his co-workers a stimulus and, in his own way, a master.

He was a man and an entrepreneur with a vision of his subject, machine tool engineering, a good ten years ahead of his time. His determination and will had a major effect on his company's business, guaranteeing it excellent development in times that were far from easy for the Italian economy. He had a great power to attract young graduates and technicians, but he was equally intolerant of those whom he did not consider ready and willing to learn quickly, rapidly bringing an active contribution to the company. He was very demanding with his staff, he detested carelessness and lack of precision, which could make him rather difficult to deal with in human relations.

Many of us heard him say more than once that in his business career he had dismissed more than 50 engineers because he considered them not up to standard. He was extremely devoted to applied research, experimentation and the designing of new production solutions even if these were, at times, not marketable, due to their complexity or cost. But this propensity for the development of new machines tended to distract him from corporate management, absorbing considerable amounts of time and financial resources and it was one of the reasons for the decline of his company.

The invention that made him famous was undoubtedly the P4 Panel Bender and, shortly afterwards, the idea of connecting it to the S4 with a synergic, automatic operation. But he would say, and I quote his words, " I will not be remembered for the P4, but for D&F, (Design and Function) which is the most important and decisive factor in how machine tools are conceived". We shall return to this subject several times in the course of this article. He taught us to work in a group, in view of the wide-ranging knowledge and subjects that are required for our work; so in actual fact he built a school, which produced pupils, myself among them, who then continued the enterprise, increasing its size and the number of its personnel.

In the first twenty years of activity we brought the name and trademark of Salvagnini to distant countries that were new to our products, promoting alongside a great Italian and European manufacturer. Today the Salvagnini brand, that bears his name, is extremely well-known in all environments which treat the plastic deformation of thin sheet metal. Thank you, Engr. Guido; we are going to keep on spreading our brand in the future, for another twenty years at least, developing new avant-garde products and system solutions.

The history of the company, of which we are remembering only one stage today, is fruit of the work, commitment and ingenuity of a few hundred men throughout the world to whom the company offered an opportunity, which was seized with enthusiasm, dedication and determination. For this reason, also on behalf of all the foreign colleagues, I thank you, wishing you every success in the future.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Dr. Mario Marobin for the time and dedication spent in collecting these "recollections" and for the imprinting he left in the many people who knew him and with whom he worked throughout the long years of Salvagnini.

Francesco Scarpari

President

From Quarto Oggiaro to Sarego

From the automatic bending lines to the panel bender

The P4 Panel Bender

Salvagnini Electronics

The punching machine S4

The square root

Sbo Sbz Tb

Questions of rhythm

Plasma Vs Marziano

5 July 1982 Italy-Brazil three to two

Cutting questions

The Alps Project

D&F

The aviation club

MAX90

Quadri

Salvagnini Voest Alpine

D&M

Pro-Nest

Sarego Lamiera

Cimac

The Panel CADCAM

India-Lima-Victory & India-Lima-Golf

Perestroika

Pluri and the unfinished works

The relay

Delivery of the thousandth system

Laser cutting

Roboformer

Continuous punching S2

New industrial structures

Mechanical machining project

Opera & Metalstudio

Pininfarina

From the sill to the panel

Via ing. Guido Salvagnini, 1

The new generation panel bender P4-2525 abt

Steel & Style

The Nespolo Blu (the blue medlar)

The “Minha casa minha vida” programme

AAON ambient comfort

SL4 combined laser

Around the world

The company Ingegner Salvagnini S.r.l. was founded in 1963 in a basement in the Milanese district of Quarto Oggiaro, with the engineer Guido Salvagnini, his wife Elena Schiratti and his sister Paola Salvagnini as founding partners. The new-born company dealt with the design and construction of lubrication units, with the sister having an active role in external relations. Sandro Quadri, electrician, and his wife Flavia Margutti entered the company four years later to cover a role of major importance for the initial growth of the company.

Amelio Bergo, mechanic and expert in hydraulics, was employed by Salvagnini in 1968 following lengthy negotiations: Amelio worked at PROdest, a company with a staff of eighty, and was reluctant to move to such a small company. Not long after, the draftsman, Antonio Codatto, and the mechanic, Franco Treccani, arrived.

In 1970, the company moved to the municipality of Bresso, in via Matteotti11, close to the airport, in a building too small to be called a factory shed. This requirement derived from the need to build and assemble the more bulky interlocking mechanisms of presses for the moulding of the sheet metal panels. The interlocking mechanisms, denominated by Salvagnini as "bar transfers", were a product of the natural evolution of machines using hydraulic technologies. The principle of the transfer movement was the “pilgrim step mechanism” which accompanied the sheet metal panels to be moulded, from press to press, with a co-movement consisting of clamping, advance, disengagement and backward movement to reset. With the move, the company changed its name to Salvagnini Transferica S.p.A., with the memorandum of association of 22 June, 1973.

The next step was then the construction of complete lines, presses included, for the processing of sheet metal panels. The lines built for Candy electrical household appliances to produce the sides of fridges and for Lips-Vago to produce changing room lockers for the armed forces were the first of a sizeable number of punching and bending lines suitable to meet the requirements of mass production.

The '70s are characterized as the years of juvenile problems and protests, of workers' struggles and great social tension. Even the small company of Salvagnini with fewer than 30 employees had to deal with mandatory orders to strike several times. First-hand accounts describe how employees escaped via the roof of the factory in order to avoid punitive beatings, for a dispute over strike action. These reasons together with the cramped premises in the centre of town prompted Engr. Salvagnini to consider moving the company to more pleasant surroundings such as, for example, his native town, Bagnoli di Sopra in the province of Padua.

The choice then fell on Sarego, at the suggestion of Dr. Alberto Zambon who had recently moved the chemical plant of his company there from the city of Vicenza to Almisano. So the next step was to purchase the land, 60,000 sq. m. for 60 million lire, a substantial figure in that period. The land was set in the centre of a rural area in the Veneto countryside, considered economically-depressed at  

the time, for which reason special financial concessions were provided by the local authorities in order to encourage industrial development. Engr. Salvagnini only gave the go-ahead after having asked the employees he considered essential, i.e. Quadri, Margutti, Bergo, Treccani and Codatto , to move to Veneto, and after having obtained their consent. In autumn of 1973 ground works were commenced for the construction of the new shed. In May of 1974, activities began on the first bay which had, in the meantime, been completed. Nani Somaggio of Sarego was the first ever employee hired at the start of the year even before the shed was built, in order to meet one of the eligibility conditions for public subsidy.

Local people were then hired to replace those who had not moved to Veneto and in order to be able to meet increased production requirements. A few years later, Salvagnini suffered a falling off of the markets which led it briefly to venture into the design and construction of special machinery for the tanning industry: the hides were taken manually from the treatment stations and deposited on trestles, "fiore" to "fiore", "crosta" to "crosta", to use the jargon of the time. In other words, they were stacked, one facing up and the other facing down, well centered because they were also of different sizes. Engr. Salvagnini even managed to automate this process too. Still during this period of crisis, he even attempted to design a machine for the processing of fish after they had been caught, but finally surrendered in the face of the octopus, a fish whose unusual shape did not adapt well to the purpose.

The automatic bending lines produced in the '70s should be remembered for the important role they had in the origin of the panel bender P4. Totally automated, they could produce sheet metal panels at a speed of 300 panels per hour. Their automation, all in hardwired logic, with Siemens Simatic modules, did not allow the programming of the line which required long equipment changing times for each production change. In any case, the systems met the time requirements that followed “push” production systems, i.e. huge batches of identical parts destined for assembling and then for the finished product warehouses, rather than the “pull” production systems, i.e.small batches different from each other, that were developed years later with the “just in time” approaches.

The automatic line included work stations positioned in series in the sense that the sheet metal panel transited through them, exiting as a bent panel with one or two folds on each side. The various stations listed in order are: the coil feeding station, the shearing and sheet straightening station, the notching and cutting station, the bending station for the long right side, the bending station for the long left side, and the analogous stations for the bending on the short sides. Production output was so high because each station performed its own operation at the same time as the other stations performed theirs, so the final cycle time was that of just one station. The panels were all identical and the concept of flexibility, in terms of different panels, did not exist yet.

Here Engr. Salvagnini applied his own “bending intuition” for 90° bends on a sheet that transited on a horizontal transfer surface. The idea was that, rather than cutting, the two shearing blades with a clearance equal to the thickness of the sheet metal panel would bend the metal as though they were blunt scissors. Shearing blades with a rectangular section and a bevelled edge therefore became blades for the bending units of the automatic lines. The system offered the advantage of simplicity of construction and equal distribution of the loads. In order to make more than one bend on the same side, the station was equipped with a kind of transversal slide which moved the sheet with respect to the fixed bending unit by a distance defined by a number of mechanical spacers.

A further “intuition-challenge” for Engr. Salvagnini was that of keeping the sheet metal panel still while moving the bending units in order to add further bends on the sides of the sheet. In this way, it was possible to have both bending units (both on the right and on the left) operating at the same time, thereby obtaining a reduction in the overall length of the automatic production line.

The engineer had resolved the problem of moving, with precision and speed, large masses, the presses with the bending units, designing and constructing details and effective hydraulic shock absorbers2. The solution had already been applied, although on a smaller scale, in the automation mechanisms of the service transfers to the Fiat and Lagostina moulding press lines built years earlier.

From these considerations the “Great Idea” of supplying the hitherto unavailable dimensional flexibility in the production of the panels was developed, using just one press instead of the four in use in the automatic lines. With just one fixed press and a face for the sheet metal panel, a manipulator for the roto- translation of the sheet on the front of the press provided the necessary degrees of freedom required to bend sheet metal of any length and width. In order to prevent slipping of the sheet of metal held tight in a clamp, the manipulator was stiff and heavy while fast movement and precise stopping was required. The Salvagnini hydraulic shock absorber provided the solution for the precision stopping of a large mass which the technology of the time did not know how to control.

So a panel bender was developed with a much lower output (approximately a quarter compared to the previous bending line) but with a fast production change time, thereby guaranteeing production flexibility through an automatic cycle. The four-side P4 Panel Bender, is a neologism still used today, just like others coined by Engr. Salvagnini for a machine that did not exist on the market.

On September 19, 1977 at the Provincial Industry, Commerce and Handicraft Office of Milan an industrial invention patent was filed under the name of Guido Salvagnini, entitled “Machine for the production of rectangular sheet metal panels with bent edges”. The next day was the opening of the 2ND EMO in Hanover with Salvagnini Transferica S.p.A. which was exhibiting the newly patented machine, P4 Panel Bender number one.

The machine was an absolute innovation destined to go down in history as embodying the new way for the flexible production of sheet metal panels which, up until that time, had been produced with dedicated lines in large batches, or with manual press-brakes in small batches. The machine cycle was guaranteed by a mechanical programmer, due to the absence of suitable computerised numerical control systems.

The patent filed claimed a machine equipped with a single bending mould composed of the combination of a press-brake and a manipulator. The press- brake consisted of two counterblades for the tightening of the sheet of metal on the horizontal support and two vertically mobile bending blades. The manipulator, whose movement was at right angles to the press, consisted of a sheet rotator with a tightening clamp and a mechanical programmer for the geometric positions to be taken up. The patent thus devised gave Salvagnini extremely effective protection which was used profitably in the years that followed against the competition's attempts to create imitations designed by ex-employees3 and constructed by important competitors such as AMADA and Finn Power. The support to effectively protect the company's intellectual property came from the experience of Dr. Alberto Zambon, owner of the pharmaceutical company of the same name with headquarters in Bresso, a Milanese district in which Engr. Salvagnini had lived and worked from the early ’60s until 1974, when he moved the business to Sarego.

Dr. Alberto Zambon and Engr. Guido Salvagnini had met at a dinner in Milan thanks to their respective lady wives, Marta Ghirardi and Elena  

Table of serial numbers of the P4s built between 1977 and 1982. The table was a transparency from the technical office written in Indian ink, with the adding of a line for each new order. Copies of the transparencies were then distributed throughout the company as a reference for the design, construction, customer care and administration departments (ERP in the ’80s).

SIM=Siemens hardwired logic with mechanical programmer. SAL=Salvagnini electronic control system TMS9900. TEX=Texas Instruments control system TMS9900. DIG=Digital control system PDP11.

Schiratti who, being related, had decided to meet up again. This event led to many years of fruitful cooperation lasting until the early ’90s, with Alberto Zambon as shareholder and board member of Salvagnini Transferica S.p.A.

It is worth giving an extra mention to the mechanical programmer because this control method contrived by Engr. Salvagnini in absence of computerised numerical control systems escaped the attention even of the majority of sector experts. With reference to the patent drawings, rods (49) of a length preset on the basis of the height of the flaps to be bent were screwed on to a kind of motor- driven revolver (48). The revolver was divided into four sections, one for each side of the panel to be bent. The rods were then electrically connected to a switchboard equipped with enabling-disabling contact pins. The sequence and the number of bends to be made depended on how many contact pins were inserted. We can travel back in our mind's eye to the cinema déco period, where switchboard operators passed their time inserting and removing contact pins from the switchboard.

The photo alongside shows the setting up of the mechanical programmer assembled on a bracket screwed onto the side of the manipulator. On the opposite side, not visible in the photo, were the processed parts ready for the assembling of an analogous mechanical programmer for the backward movement of the manipulator during sheet rotation; a saving of a few percentage points on the overall cycle time, but certainly not negligible for Engr. Salvagnini, who always strove to obtain maximum performance from his works.

Another strength of the brand new P4 was its hydraulic shock absorber (51) against which the rods (49) of the mechanical programmer came to rest. The substantial mass of the manipulator was moved at high speed by the hydraulic cylinders (24) and brought to rest precisely against its mechanical stop at the end of rapid and constant braking actioned by the shock absorber.

P4 no.1 (1977). The mechanical programmer on the side of the manipulator is encased while on the cabinet there is a panel with contact pins for the programming of the bends.

P4 no.15 exhibited at the Chicago exhibition in September 1980, by Wiedemann following the Salvagnini Warner&Swasey agre- ement for the marketing of the P4 on the US market.