The Zipwelders are considered one of the most advanced shear welders. These fully automatic welding machines were developed with an intention to reduce the operator involvement and increase mill uptime by reducing weld failures. The Zipwelders are designed for use on either start/stop or continuous lines in units like pickling plant, tube/pipe mill, coil buildup plant, rolling mill, and coil prep plant for a variety of applications such as stamping, coil buildup, rolling mill, tube/pipe mill, slitting, annealing, pickling and galvanizing and others. These machines can also be used for welding a wide range of alloys including stainless steel, carbon steel, and aluminum. The Zipwelders are ideally suited for meeting process line requirement and can also be used as transport welds, which allows the Zipwelders to be removed at the end of the line, or for use in coil buildup. The Zipwelders can also be used to doing butt welding works that makes the welded material as strong as the parent material, as well as for special applications such as narrow width and light gauge welding applications. Though the Zipwelders are considered a subtype of shearwelders, these are meant to be used for slightly different sort of applications.
The modern day RCM Zipwelders make use of some of the most advanced welding methodologies such as Tungsten Inert Gas (T.I.G.) welding, Plasma welding, Metallic Inert Gas (M.I.G.) welding, and last but no the least Laser Beam welding. The uniqueness about the Zipwelders is that the can shear and butt weld a variety of materials at varied range of thickness be it 0.45mm to about 25mm and as wide as necessary. With the advent of new technology, newly developed Zipwelders machines can weld any type of weldable material, and have the capability to weld metals up to 2,000mm wide. These RCM Zipwelders are ideally suited for use in strip joining steel plates and coils, or any other weldable material, including a wide range of a wide range of weldable alloys such as stainless steel, carbon steel, and even aluminum.
Another major example of innovation in Zipwelders is the ME 500-28 Zipwelder™. This Zipwelder is a computer operated automatic welder, equipped with an exit pinch roll and an entry crop shear, both mounted on a grid system; to help in quick installation. The ME 500-28 Zipwelder™ has been designed in such a manner that it can cut through a steel sample up to 24 long from a steel coil. When operated in automatic mode, the trailing coil end automatically stops in the shear opening, whereas the exit side guides center the strip automatically, allowing the exit weld clamp to close down automatically. The operator feeds the leading steel coil into the Zipwelder™, and then the entry sides and entry weld clamp closes. The specialty of Zipwelder™ is that it automatically shears the two coil ends, and automatically makes an MIG weld based on the selection as per the on-board computer which controls not just the weld gap, wire speed, weld speed, but also the welding voltage. As with shear welder, these zipwelders can be similarly custom designed, as per the requirement of the customer, with requisite specifications as demanded.