How Fabco-Air Custom Cylinder Solutions Ensure Application Success
Oftentimes, standard pneumatic actuators won’t meet all of your application’s requirements. The result of having to tailor the product’s capabilities may cost you a lot of time and resources. With the right supplier, it’s easier and more cost-effective to modify a standard actuator or commission a brand new design in order to get the performance you need.
At Fabco-Air, we’re experts in delivering custom-built pneumatic solutions that meet your exact specifications. We offer a wide range of customization options for nearly all of our products, and we have the capabilities to produce completely new designs if you still can’t find what you’re looking for.
Here is an overview of some of the modifications you can choose from when specifying custom pneumatic components.
Material Options for Every Environment
Industries like packaging and automotive usually have rugged plant environments that subject machinery to impacts, shocks, heavy loads, extreme temperatures and harmful chemicals. Standard components operating in these environments without special accommodation can wear out early or underperform, leading to broken equipment, damaged products, extensive downtime and production losses.
It’s important to be aware of the different material options available to you in order to mitigate or even eliminate avoidable damage to your machinery and products. To this end, we offer different material modifications for our pneumatic cylinders, slides and actuators. For example, consider specifying your component with high-quality stainless steel components. We also manufacture cylinder bodies out of Delrin®, a corrosion-resistant polymer that offers protection from caustic chemicals in washdown environments.
Space-saving Alterations For Tight Fits
Installing standard products in tight or unconventional spaces can easily cut into your project’s budgeted time. We recognize how critical it is to remain on schedule and can alter a standard product’s size and shape without compromising performance to ensure your project is completed on time.
We also can design a completely new custom solution according to your specifications. With a tailor-made product, you can determine the exact length, bore, width and height you need to easily implement the component. We also can modify a product’s shape to meet alignment requirements. As an example in a medical application, we added flats to a Pancake® II cylinder’s end caps to align exactly with packaging machinery.
Mounting Adjustments For Easy Installation
We offer a wide range of standard mounting styles for our air cylinders and slides. But to make installation even easier, we also modify a product to fit the mounting style you need. With the freedom to choose the size, shape and mounting style, you’ll have no trouble installing a Fabco-Air component.
Exhaust Port Configurations to Modify Cycle Speed
Depending on your requirements, you may need more or less compressed air pumped through your actuator. We can alter your actuator’s port sizes and locations based on your specifications with no performance loss.
Combined Solutions Deliver Versatility
Our advanced manufacturing capabilities enable us to combine multiple products into one. We can integrate air cylinders, linear slides, rotary actuators and grippers to create a solution tailored to your exact requirements.
For one customer, we paired a Multi-Power® air cylinder and linear slide into one custom unit for an automotive application. This combination unit can supply 4,720 pounds of force at 100 psi while also delivering hydraulic shock and speed control. The custom-built product also provides adjustable strokes, high power and precision guiding.
In another application that required a compact form factor, we integrated two linear pneumatic slides into a single housing. One of the two slides provides three-position actuation to achieve a truly unique result. All this was encased in a single, hard anodized body with stainless steel hardware for washdown resistance.
Adding More Thrust
If you require more output thrust without increasing your pneumatic cylinder’s bore, we can implement our Multi-Power design in our Pancake®, Pancake II and air press product lines.
Additional Accessories
We also can integrate a wide range of accessories into our products like rod locks, stop collars, shock absorbers, rod wipers and position sensors. One common request is noise or impact reduction, so we incorporate cushions to soften impacts and extend equipment lifetime. Both adjustable and fixed cushioning options are available, and our silent seal bumpers are an excellent additional feature to further reduce noise.
To learn more, check out our custom solutions page or contact us.
