Meet The Metal Plate Rollers Used By NASA

When it comes to metal rolling and forming, Davi is a name known around the world. Promoting themselves as the largest plate rolling and angle roll manufacturer in the world, the title ‘most popular’ is one that might also fit well with the group.

Their resume sure speaks for itself. Davi’s rollers and formers have been utilised at a global scale, in Australia, they are responsible for rolling the thousands of wind towers, irrigation pipes, pylons and fuel tanks seen nationwide. Overseas, they’re used to form containment vessels for nuclear power plants in China and, in the US, NASA is also using Davi rollers to create the Titanium shuttle parts and fuel tanks used in their various space shuttles.

At Austech 2017, our content team was able to sit down with Mike Dyes, Director of Fabrication and Equipment Supplies (the exclusive Australian agent for DAVI products since 2002), and discuss all their latest developments in rolling and forming machinery.

Q: How are these machines able to handle such heavy duty material?

A: The machine here is a 2-metre machine with a 170 diameter top roll, the capacity of that machine with stainless steel over the 2 metres is probably only 3 millimetres. So, what dictates the capacity of these machines is the length of the top roll verse the diameter of the top roll.

Davi has machines rolling 250-metre thick mild steel, at 4 metres wide and, if you were to heat the rolls to the point where they are cherry red, they can roll 400 millimetre plates- 4 metres wide.

Those machines are in China rolling containment vessels for nuclear power plants.

Q: What’s the Market trend for Rollers and Formers In Australia at the moment?

A: Originally, a lot of the customer base were using older 3-roll machines. So we brought 4-roller machines to the Australian market, which have a higher production rate and better accuracy. We now have about 90 nationwide. The demand is unbelievable and in Australia, things seem to be picking up in certain parts of the market.

We’ve just finalised a big contract in Grafton, where 20 thousand tonnes of pylons will be rolled on-site. They are rolling off the machine, 22 hundred diametres by 25 millimetres thick, 350-grade steel.

They were going to buy two machines. But unfortunately, they’re only buying one now, simply because of the efficiency they’ve received off having one!

Q: How about at a smaller scale? what types of jobs can these rollers be used for?

A: “A guy approached me with this job to help form the Telstra Pillars you see out in the street and his first order was for 5,000. He’d bought a cheap machine and the quality of what he was doing, plus the volume was ridiculously bad. He was behind in his order, so I stepped in and rolled the first thousand for him using our Davi machine, we were producing them at a rate of 56 per hour”

Q: How has Davi captured that reputation as the number one press rolling manufacturer?

A: One of the main reasons is we have the best after sales service. Once you have the machine, if you have a problem, you don’t want to wait. If we have a component failure we’ll identify the problem and have the component delivered within 5 working days, from our huge spare parts Factory in Italy.

So, worst case scenario is a few days to get back up and running. That’s unheard of with our competition. When you get service like that you don’t talk to anyone else.