Smg Design Hub

Many years ago I teamed up with a brilliant engineer and time served draughtsman this hub is in his memory Mike Reynolds.

Mike was a brilliant engineer and manufacturing demolition equipment was his game. I had always had one foot in the demolition industry and diggers tractors and trucks were my bag.

At the time we were making various attachments like recycling grabs and concrete pulverizors to name a few.

At this stage we decided to get semi technical and purchased a profile cutter that was fitted with a majic eye.

The unit had six cutter heads so if you wanted every time you made one part you could put five into stock. Sounds great ?? well sort of, Every part then had to grinded and fettled and this uses a lot of man hours and grinding discs.

As well as that every thing had to be re drawn in Indian ink which was the only medium the majic eye could follow.

If we needed a bigger part then it all had to be drawn again, And then again in Indian ink.

So picture a busy fabrication shop with six hundred amp mig welders going all day and grinders,

Add to the mix oxy propane cutting equipment and a whole raft of other equipment and you get the picture.

Why so bothered about the other equipment.?

One more element to add is of course a load of men with suspect house keeping habits and just generally untidy working habits.

Well throw into the mix a bit of oil and grease smudges onto a drawing and the majic eye does not like it one bit. Now do not mis understand me we were still ahead of the game in regards to most of our competitors but while things are buzzing along nicely you should have no problems.

In reality we were turning over a tonne of money and spending a tonne of money.

The problems start when there is a downturn if you do not have the facility to automate most of your processes you are going to run into trouble and so it was for us.

At this time I had been learning cad as a home study course and it was going very slow indeed. Not enough hours in the day.

I eventualy got up to speed with the cad software when I purchased all the training equipment. Up untill then I had just been feeling my way around it and it was a very fast learning curve as I knew where everything was.

Going to post some pictures of the design and the finished product and where I can a video of the equipment working.

Above is a grab typically fitted to a twenty tonne Backhoe on 80 mm pins

Here is a pulverizor which is used to remove the metal reinforcing bars from the concrete. Prior to the invention of these concrete would of been crushed with a crushing plant and the wear on conveyor belts was extreme to say the least.

A ripper tooth fitted to a caterpillar 322 at work ripping out rock.

This is a hydraulic shear designed in turbocad professional v 15. We did not make a lot of these as they were notoriously expensive to manufacture. We did design one that was virtually a big pair of scissors I will post that later.